Lord Wellington in the preceding autumn, as soon as he fell back to the lines of Torres Vedras, had represented to his own Government the distress to which those districts must be reduced through which the enemy passed, ... a distress which Portugal had no means of relieving. “Upon former occasions,” he said, “the wealthy inhabitants of Great Britain, and of London in particular, had stepped forward to relieve foreign nations, whether suffering under the calamities inflicted by Providence, or by a cruel and powerful enemy. Portugal had once before experienced such a proof of friendship from her oldest and most faithful ally: but never was there case in which this assistance was required in a greater degree than at present, whether the sufferings of the people, or their loyalty and patriotism, and their attachment to England, were considered. I declare,” said Lord Wellington, “that I have scarcely known an instance in which any person in Portugal, of any order, has had communication with the enemy, inconsistent with his duty to his own sovereign, or with the orders he had received. There is no instance of the inhabitants of any town or village having remained, or of their having failed to remove what might be useful to the enemy, when they had sufficiently early intimation of the wishes of Government, or of myself, that they should abandon their houses, and carry away their property.” He therefore recommended this brave and suffering people to the British Government, and the British people, whenever the country should be cleared of its barbarous invaders, as he hoped and trusted that it would.
♦April 8.
Parliamentary grant for the relief of the Portugueze.♦
That hope had now been accomplished: his letter was laid before Parliament, and a message from the Prince Regent was presented, stating, “That, having taken into consideration the distress to which the inhabitants of a part of Portugal had been exposed, in consequence of the invasion of that country, and especially from the wanton and savage barbarity exercised by the French in their recent retreat, which could not fail,” he said, “to affect the hearts of all persons who had any sense of religion or humanity, he desired to be enabled to afford to the suffering subjects of his Majesty’s good and faithful ally, such speedy and effectual relief as might be suitable to this interesting and afflicting occasion.” Accordingly a grant of ♦Marquis Wellesley.♦ 100,000l. was proposed; Marquis Wellesley saying, when he moved an address to this effect, “he hoped he had not lived to see the day, though he had sometimes been surprised by hearing something like it, when it should be said that ancient faith, long-tried attachment, and close connexion with our allies, were circumstances to be discarded from our consideration, and that they should be sacrificed and abandoned to the mere suggestions and calculations of a cold ♦Earl Grosvenor.♦ policy.” Earl Grosvenor was the only person who demurred at this motion. “He felt considerable difficulty in acceding to it,” he said, “particularly when he considered how much had been done already for Portugal, and he would ask whether their lordships were really prepared to take the whole burden upon themselves, and exempt the Portugueze altogether from the charge of relieving their own countrymen? It was a principle as applicable to public as to private affairs, that you should be just to your own people before ♦Marquis of Lansdowne.♦ you were generous to other nations.” The Marquis of Lansdowne spoke in a better mind: “Whatever,” he said, “might have been his opinion regarding the policy of our exertions in Portugal, no doubt existed with him, that the efforts made by the people of Portugal eminently deserved at our hands the aid now asked, to relieve that distress into which they had been plunged by the enemy. Even, therefore, if he believed that Lord Wellington would be again compelled to retreat, still he would vote for the present motion, convinced that it could not fail to make an impression in Europe highly favourable to the British character, by displaying its beneficence, its generosity, and its humanity, as contrasted with the savage barbarity of the enemy. In extending to the people of Portugal that generosity for which they might look through Europe and the world in vain, we placed our national character upon a pinnacle of greatness which nothing could destroy. Even if our army was compelled to evacuate Portugal, and we should be unable to withstand there the progress of the French, still the posterity of the inhabitants of Portugal would remember with gratitude the aid afforded to their ancestors in the hour of their distress. For these reasons, the address should have his hearty concurrence.”
♦Mr. Ponsonby.♦
Mr. Ponsonby in like manner, when the vote was moved in the Commons, declared, “that it was not less due to the spirit of Portugal, than to the magnanimity of Great Britain, ... that it was as consistent with our interest, as it was material to our honour. The only regret,” said he, “with which it is accompanied on my part, proceeds from the reflection, that the vast expenditure of this country should render it necessary to limit the vote to so small a sum.” But the liberality of the British people has seldom been more conspicuously displayed, than in the subscriptions which were made on this occasion. About 80,000l. was subscribed. The public grant was to be measured, not by ♦Public subscription.♦ the necessities of the Portugueze sufferers, but by the means of the British Government; and the Prince of Brazil called it “a most ample donation, entirely corresponding to the generosity with which a great nation and its Government had assisted Portugal.” The individual proofs of beneficence were acknowledged in the most honourable manner; the Prince issued an order, that the list of subscribers should be printed at the royal printing-office, and copies sent to the chambers of each of the suffering districts, where, having been publicly read after mass, they should be laid up in the Cartorios, or archives of the respective districts; the original list was to be deposited among the royal archives in the Torre do Tombo at Lisbon, “that the humanity of the one nation,” said the Prince, “and the gratitude of the other may be attested to future generations.”
♦Distribution of the grant.♦
The dezembargador, Joam Gaudencio Torres, and Mr. Croft (one of a family which had been long established at Porto, and who was subsequently attached to the British legation) accepted the charge of distributing this grant, and for that purpose, of visiting the districts which had been ravaged, and seeing in person to the distribution. It required no common degree of humanity, and no ordinary strength of heart, to undertake so painful an office. The time, it may be hoped, is approaching, when the usages of war will as little be admitted before man, as a plea for having destroyed the innocent and the helpless, as it will before God. Massena had gone to the utmost limits of that dreadful plea before he broke up from his position. Opposite to the house in which he had fixed his own quarters at Santarem were the ruins of a church, into which a number of wretched children, whose parents had perished, and who were themselves perishing for hunger, had crept, that they might lie down and ♦Children famished at Santarem.♦ die. They were found there by the first British troops who entered the town, stretched upon straw and rubbish ... the dying and the dead together, reduced to skeletons before they died. When the officer, who relates this in his journal, saw them, pieces of bread which our soldiers had given these poor orphans were lying untouched before many who were incapable of eating, and some who had breathed their last. Multitudes, indeed, had been famished before he abandoned his hopes of conquest; but for the subsequent conduct of that merciless general and his army no military motives can be assigned ... none but what are purely malignant and devilish. Marshal Massena had formerly declared, that if he could land with an army in England, he would pledge himself, not indeed to effect the conquest of the country, but to reduce it to a desert. In Portugal it was proved that out of the wickedness of his heart his lips had then spoken; for on his retreat, he endeavoured, in perfect conformity with the political system of his emperor, to increase by every possible means the horrors of war and the sum of human suffering. The cruelties which were perpetrated by that retreating army formed but a little part of the evils they inflicted upon the brave nation which had successfully ♦State in which the French left the country they had occupied.♦ resisted them; and in the districts which they devastated, the inhabitants who perished under their hands were less to be compassionated than those who survived. The famine which they intentionally produced, by destroying every thing in the course of their retreat and within reach of their power, continued to depopulate the country long after it was delivered from its enemies. Endemic diseases were produced by want of food and of raiment, by exposure, by grief, and hopeless wretchedness. The hospitals, with which Portugal abounded, had shared the general destruction: many had been burnt, others gutted, the resources of all destroyed; and those of the clergy and of the convents, to which the sufferers would otherwise have looked for aid, and from which they would have found it, were in like manner totally dilapidated. The income of the Bishop of Leyria was reduced from 40,000 cruzados to forty; and others had suffered in a like degree. In that district the population was cut down by the barbarities of the enemy, by famine, and by disease, from 48,000 to 16,000; and in the subdivision ♦Pombal.♦ of Pombal from 7000 to 1800. Two hundred families in the town of Pombal derived before the invasion a comfortable subsistence from husbandry; after the retreat an hundred and sixty-four of those families had totally disappeared; and the few survivors of the remaining thirty-six were suffering under famine and disease. In a principal street of that poor town the commissioners found one dismantled dwelling, standing alone in the midst of ruins, and containing three wretched inhabitants. Such was the desolation which this more than barbarous enemy had left behind them, that in what had been the populous and ♦Santarem.♦ flourishing town of Santarem, the screech owls took possession of a whole street of ruins, where it seemed as if man had been employed in reducing human edifices to a state which rendered them fit receptacles for birds and beasts of prey. The number of these birds, and the boldness with which the havoc everywhere about inspired them, made it frightful to pass that way even in the daytime; insomuch, that a soldier who had been promoted for his personal bravery was known more than once to forego his mess, rather than pass to it through these ruins. Dogs who were now without owners preyed upon the dead. Wolves fed on human ♦Leyria.♦ bodies in the streets of Leyria; and retaining then no longer their fear of man, attacked the living who came in their way. The servant of an English gentleman was pursued one evening by two, in the outskirts of that city; he escaped from them only by climbing a single olive tree, which, happily for him, had been left standing; it was just high enough to afford him security, yet so low that the wolves besieged him in it all night; three or four others joined them in the blockade, and when he was seen and rescued in the morning, the bark as high as they could reach had been scored by their repeated endeavours to spring up and seize him.
There were parts of the country where the people, having no other sustenance, allayed the pain of emptiness without supplying the wants of nature, by eating boiled grass, which they seasoned, such as could, with the brine and scales left in the baskets from which salt fish, or sardinhas had been sold, these being at that time the scarce and almost only remaining articles of food. Among a people in this extreme distress, the commissioners had the painful task of selecting the cases which could bear no deferment of relief, when every case was urgent, when multitudes were perishing for want, and when the whole amount of the means of relief at their disposal, economized as those means were to the utmost, was deplorably inadequate to the just and pressing claims upon it. Eighteen months after the retreat, the price of provisions in the wasted provinces was about six times higher than before the invasion; a fact from which some conception may be formed of the misery endured in the course of those months, and of the state of things when the commissioners entered upon their arduous and painful task. Inadequate to this dreadful necessity as the aid of England was, yet, while it is to be feared a greater number perished for want of human, or of timely help, 43,000 sick and 8000 orphans were saved by it. The relief was not bestowed in food alone, and in the means of removal, but in the means of future subsistence ... cows, oxen, implements of agriculture, and seed of various kinds. The gratitude of the people, to their honour it should be said, was more in proportion to the intention and good-will which were thus manifested, than to the actual relief which was afforded. And if in Portugal, as there would have been in any other country, men were found whose hearts were so hard and their consciences so stupified that they sought only how to make the necessities and miseries of their fellow-creatures an occasion of lucre for themselves, it may safely be asserted, that never in any public calamity was there less of such wicked selfishness displayed than at this time. The commissioners who were employed ten months upon this service, (which was not less hazardous than painful, for it exposed them continually to contagious disease as well as to the constant sight of suffering), performed their office gratuitously, and would not consent to have their personal expenses reimbursed: the secretary and assistants who always accompanied them refused to accept any pecuniary recompense for their time and labour: and the house of the Vanzellers of Porto advanced money for purchasing great part of the cattle, and would receive no commission whatever upon the negociation and payment of the bills. A brother of that house, while the allied army occupied the lines, received under his own roof at Lisbon, and at his own cost maintained more than forty refugees, who were all personally unknown to him before that time: and at his mother’s[22] country house near Porto, as many as came daily were fed in her own presence, from seventy to an hundred and upwards being the usual number. It is consolatory to record such examples in a history where so many errors and crimes must be recorded. When the distribution was completed, the Portugueze Regency assured the British Government that there did not appear to have been a single complaint against the justice and regularity with which it had been made, and that this scrupulous and efficient application of the grant to the ends intended was owing to the unwearied exertion of Mr. Croft and his colleagues: they added, that they should lay those high services, as they properly denominated them, before the Prince of Brazil, and expressed their desire that Mr. Croft’s conduct might be made known to the Prince Regent of Great Britain. That gentleman was, in consequence, created a Baronet, and received the royal Portugueze order of the Tower and Sword.
♦Political effect of the distribution.♦
No measure could have had the effect of inspiring the Portugueze people with so much confidence, as this public distribution of seed corn, and tools, and cattle. They who had been most apprehensive of another invasion, were convinced that Great Britain would not have conferred such a gift, if what was now bestowed upon them were likely to be wrested from them by the enemy; and under that conviction they resumed in hope those labours, from which despair might otherwise have deterred them. But it was far from Lord Wellington’s intention to deceive them into any fallacious opinion of their own security; on the contrary, his first thought, after he had driven the French beyond the frontier, was to warn the Portugueze that the danger might yet be renewed. “Their nation,” he said, “had still riches left, which the tyrant would endeavour to plunder: they were happy under a beneficent sovereign, and this alone would make him exert himself to destroy their happiness: they had successfully resisted him, and therefore he would leave no possible means unemployed for bringing them under his iron yoke.” He appealed to all who had witnessed the successive invasions of Junot, Soult, and Massena, whether the system of the French had not been to confiscate, to plunder, and to commit every outrage which their atrocious dispositions could devise? and whether from the general, to the lowest soldier, they had not delighted in the practice of such excesses? “The Portugueze,” he said, “ought not to relax their preparations for resistance. Every man capable of bearing arms ought to learn the use of them: those who, by their age or sex, were not capable of taking the field, should beforehand look out for places of safety where they might retire in time of need: they should bury their most valuable effects, every one in secret, not trusting the knowledge of the place to those who had no interest in concealing it: and they should take means for effectually concealing, or destroying the food, which, in case of necessity, could not be removed. If,” said Lord Wellington, “these measures are adopted, however superior in number the force may be which the desire of plunder and of vengeance may induce the tyrant to send again for the invasion of this country, the issue will be certain, and the independence of Portugal will be finally established, to the eternal honour of the present generation.” Having issued this proclamation, and made arrangements for the blockade of Almeida, Lord Wellington, leaving his army under Sir Brent Spencer, took advantage of the temporary inaction of the enemy to go into Alentejo.