HISTORICAL AND ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES TO CANTO VII.
For the incidents connected with Napoléon’s invasion of Portugal and Spain, and for the state of both monarchies at that period, the reader is referred to Napier’s and Southey’s Histories of the Peninsular War, and (with the necessary caution in the perusal) to Thiers’s Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire. I have endeavoured to adhere as closely to historical truth as the nature of poetical composition would permit. My residence in both Peninsular countries, since they were visited either by Southey or Napier, has enabled me to add some additional particulars, derived from sources exhibited of late years, which tend to throw fresh light upon these transactions.
The Emperor commenced with the invasion of Portugal, for various reasons, of which the chief was probably that, as there was no family alliance between France and Portugal, as between France and Spain, an injustice done to the former country would be less shocking and startling to the common feelings of mankind. That Napoléon himself regarded an invasion of Spain in that light is evident from a remarkable expression which he used in conversation with his aide-de-camp, Savary:—“I am always afraid of a change of which I do not see the scope: the best plan of all would be to avoid a war with Spain, it would be a kind of Sacrilege (he used the expression); but I shall not shrink from making it.”—Thiers, Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire.
When Junot entered Lisbon, the old Queen of Portugal was mad, and the Prince Regent possessed no vigour of character to supply the sovereign’s intellectual deficiencies. These were supposed to be in great measure chargeable upon the superstitious terrors with which her head had been filled by Dom José Maria de Mello, Bishop of Algarve and Grand Inquisitor of the Kingdom. Influenced partly by fear of Junot, and partly by the popular discontent with the fugitive government, (for the entire Royal family and Court of Portugal fled to Brazil the moment it was ascertained that Junot was on his march close to Lisbon, and left the poor miserable country to shift for itself,) the principal ecclesiastics of the kingdom, with a subserviency too characteristic of that order in every country, worshipped the rising sun, and lavished their despicable incense upon Junot and Napoléon. Cardinal Mendoza, the Patriarch of Lisbon, issued a pastoral sounding the praises of “the man whom past ages had been unable to divine, the man of prodigies, the Great Emperor whom God had called to establish the happiness of nations!” At the voice of this reverend Prince of the Church, the bishops and clergy, and in imitation of them the civil magistrates, recommended it to the faithful and to the people generally, as a binding civil and religious obligation, to receive the French cordially and pay obedience to their General. This language was especially noticeable in the mouth of the Inquisitor General, since he had always been heard to profess principles of the most diametrically opposite character. Against the “impious revolutionists” of France he had been the first to fulminate his censures. He had sought to re-establish autos-da-fé, in all their original bloody ferocity, under the reign of his august but crazy penitent. And at the commencement of the revolution he had seriously proposed the excommunication of the French nation en masse by the dignified clergy of Portugal.
The concentration of Junot’s troops around Lisbon made the reception of the French régime a matter of little difficulty. But it is not a little curious that the voice of old prophecy was made to contribute to the same result. The Nostradamus of Portugal, Bandarra, had predicted these changes as conformable to the will of God, and the triumph of the imperial eagle of Napoléon might be read in his prophetic quatrains. Curiously illustrative are these details of the character of a people of whom it has (with some exaggeration) been said that one half are waiting for the coming of Dom Sebastian, and the other half for that of the Messiah. The prophecy of Bandarra struck the nation with astonishment, and for a time they regarded it as literally fulfilled. The closeness of realization was certainly astounding. Gonzalo Annes Bandarra was a poor cobbler of Trancoso in the district of Guarda, who composed about the year 1540 some prophecies which have ever since obtained great reputation in the country, amongst all classes. His trovas or redondilhas (rhymed quatrains) have been printed several times, and in 1809 an edition was published at Barcelona. When the French entered Lisbon in 1807, the event was found by the believers in prophecy to be not only clearly predicted in Bandarra, but the Imperial power to be precisely indicated, and the first letter of the name of Napoléon, in the 17th and 18th quatrains of the third prophetic dream, which are as follows:—
“Ergue-se a Aguia imperial
Com os seus filhos ao rabo,
E com as unhas no cabo