INVASION OF PORTUGAL BY JUNOT.
Peremptory orders obliged Junot to commence operations at an unfavourable time of year, and before his preparations were completed. In his front the roads were nearly impracticable, and a part of his troops were still in the rear of Salamanca. Hence, Thiebault. his march from that town to Alcantara (where he effected his junction in the latter end of November, with the part of the Spanish force that was to act under his immediate orders) was very disastrous, and nearly disorganized his inexperienced army.
The succours he expected to receive at Alcantara were not furnished, and the repugnance of the Spanish authorities to aid him, was the cause of so much embarrassment, that his chief officers doubted the propriety of continuing operations under the accumulating difficulties of his situation; but Junot’s firmness was unabated. He knew that no English force had landed at Lisbon, and the cowardice of the Portuguese court was notorious. Encouraged by these considerations, he undertook one of those hardy enterprises which astound the mind by their success, and leave the historian in doubt if he should praise the happy daring, or stigmatise the rashness of the deed.
Without money, without transport, without ammunition sufficient for a general action, with an auxiliary force of Spaniards by no means well disposed to aid him, Junot, at the head of a raw army, penetrated the mountains of Portugal on the most dangerous and difficult line by which that country can be invaded. He was ignorant of what was passing in the interior; he knew not if he was to be opposed, nor what means were prepared to resist him; but trusting to the inertness of the Portuguese government, to the rapidity of his own movements, and to the renown of the French arms, he made his way through Lower Beira, and suddenly appeared in the town of Abrantes, a fearful and unexpected guest. There he obtained the first information of the true state of affairs. Lisbon was tranquil, and the Portuguese fleet was ready to sail, but the court still remained on shore. On hearing this, Junot, animated by the prospect of seizing the prince regent, pressed forward, and reached Lisbon in time to see the fleet, having the royal family on board, clearing the Thiebault. mouth of the Tagus. One vessel dragged astern within reach of a battery, the French general himself fired a gun at her; and on his return to Lisbon, meeting some Portuguese troops, he resolutely commanded them to form an escort for his person, and thus attended, passed through the streets of the capital. Nature alone had opposed his progress; yet such were the hardships his army had endured, that of a column which had numbered twenty-five thousand in its ranks, two thousand tired grenadiers only entered Lisbon with their general; fatigue, and want, and tempests, had scattered the remainder along two hundred miles of rugged mountains, inhabited by a warlike and ferocious peasantry, well acquainted with the strength of their fastnesses, and proud of many successful defences made by their fore-fathers against former invaders. Lisbon itself contained three hundred thousand inhabitants, and fourteen thousand regular troops were collected there. A powerful British fleet was at the mouth of the harbour; the commander, sir Sydney Smith, had urged the court to resist, and offered to land his seamen and marines to aid in the defence of the town; but his offers were declined; and the people, disgusted with the pusillanimous conduct of their rulers, and confounded by the strangeness of the scene, evinced no desire to impede the march of events. Thus three weak battalions sufficed to impose a foreign yoke upon this great capital, and illustrated the truth of Napoleon’s maxim:—that in war the moral is to the physical force as three parts to one.
The prince regent, after having at the desire of the French government, expelled the British factory, ordered the British minister plenipotentiary away from his court, sequestered British property, and shut the ports of Portugal against British merchants; after having degraded himself and his nation by performing every submissive act which France could devise to insult his weakness, was still reluctant to forego the base tenure by which he hoped to hold his crown. Alternately swayed by fear and indolence, a miserable example of helpless folly, he lingered until the reception of a Moniteur, announcing that “the house of Braganza had ceased to reign,” awoke all the energy he was capable of. At that time lord Strangford, the British minister plenipotentiary, had resigned all hope of persuading the royal family to emigrate; but sir Sydney Smith, seizing the favourable moment, threatened to commence hostilities if the emigration should be longer delayed; and thus urged, the prince regent of Portugal, the old queen his mother, and the rest of the royal family, had embarked on the 27th; and quitting the Tagus on the 29th of November[9], sailed for the Brazils, a few hours only before Junot arrived with his slight escort of grenadiers.
This celebrated emigration was beneficial to the Brazils in the highest degree, and of vast importance to England in two ways, for it ensured great commercial advantages, and it threw Portugal completely into her power in the approaching conflict; but it was disgraceful to the prince, insulting to the brave people he abandoned, and impolitic, inasmuch as it obliged men to inquire how far subjects were bound to a monarch who deserted them in their need? how far the nation could belong to a man who did not belong to the nation?
It has been observed by political economists, that where a gold and paper currency circulate together, if the paper be depreciated it will drag down the gold with it, and deteriorate the whole mass; but that after a time, the metal revolts from this unnatural state, and asserts its own intrinsic superiority. So a privileged class, corrupted by power and luxury, drags down the national character; but there is a point when the people, like the gold, no longer suffering such a degradation, will separate themselves with violence from the vices of their effeminate rulers. Before that time arrives a nation may appear to be sunk in hopeless lethargy, when it is really capable of great and noble exertions. Thus it was with the Portuguese, who were at this time unjustly despised by enemies, and mistrusted by friends.
Thiebault.
Foy.
The invading army, in pursuance of the convention of Fontainebleau, was divided into three corps; the central one, composed of the French troops, and a Spanish division, under general Caraffa, had penetrated by the two roads, which from Alcantara lead, the one by Pedragoa, the other by Sobreira Formosa; but at Abrantes, Caraffa’s division separated from the French, and took possession of Thomar. Meanwhile the right, under general Taranco, marching from Gallicia established themselves at Oporto, and the marquis of Solano, with the left, entered the Alemtejo, and fixed his quarters at Setuval. The Spanish troops did not suffer on their route; but such had been the distress of the French army, that three weeks afterwards it could only muster ten thousand men under arms, and the privations encountered on the march led to excesses which first produced that rancorous spirit of mutual hatred, so remarkable between the French and Portuguese. Young soldiers always attribute their sufferings to the ill-will of the inhabitants; it is difficult to make them understand that a poor peasantry have nothing to spare; old soldiers, on the contrary, blame nobody, but know how to extract subsistence in most cases without exciting enmity.
Junot passed the month of December in collecting his army, securing the great military points about Lisbon, and in preparations to supplant the power of a council of regency, to whom the prince at his departure had delegated the sovereign authority. As long as the French troops were scattered on the line of march, and that the fortresses were held by Portuguese garrisons, it would have been dangerous to provoke the enmity, or to excite the activity of this council, and the members were treated with studious respect; but they were of the same leaven as the court they emanated from, and the quick resolute proceedings of Junot soon deprived them of any importance conferred by the critical situation of affairs during the first three weeks.