EXTERNAL POLITICAL RELATIONS OF SPAIN.
At first these were of necessity confined to a few foreign courts; England, Sicily, and Portugal; the rest of the Old World was either subject to Buonaparte or directly under his influence; but in the New World it was different: the Brazils, after the emigration of the royal family of Braganza, became important under every point of view, and relations were established between the junta and that court, that afterwards under the cortez created considerable interest, and threatened serious embarrassments to the operations of the duke of Wellington.
The ultra-marine possessions of Spain were, of course, a matter of great anxiety to both sides; Napoleon’s activity balanced the natural preponderance of the mother country. The slowness of the local juntas, or rather their want of capacity to conduct such an affair, gave the enemy a great advantage. It Mr. Stuart’s Correspce. MS.
Sir Hew Dalrymple. was only owing to the exertions of Mr. Stuart in the north, and of sir Hew Dalrymple and lord Collingwood in the south, that, after the insurrection broke out, vessels were despatched to South America to confirm the colonists in their adherence to Spain, and to arrange the mode of securing the resources of those great possessions for the parent state. The hold which Spain retained over her colonies was, however, very slight; her harsh restrictive system had long before weakened the attachment of the South Americans; the expedition of Miranda, although unsuccessful, had kindled a fire which could not be extinguished; and it was apparent to all able statesmen, that Spain must relinquish her arbitrary mode of governing, or relinquish the colonies altogether; the insurrection at home only rendered this more certain; every argument, every public manifesto put forth in Europe, to animate the Spaniards against foreign aggression, told against them in America. Yet for a time the latter transmitted the produce of the mines, and many of the natives served in the Spanish armies.
Napoleon, notwithstanding his activity, and the offers which he made of the vice-royalty of Mexico to Cuesta, Castaños, Blake, and probably to others residing in that country, failed to create a French party of any consequence. The Americans were unwilling to plunge into civil strife for a less object than their own independence: the arrogance and injustice of Old Spain, however, increased, rather than diminished, under the sway of the insurrectional government, and at last, as it is well known, a general rebellion of the South American states established the independence of the fairest portion of the globe, and proved, how little the abstract love of freedom influenced the resistance of the old country to Napoleon.
The intercourse with the English court, which had been hitherto carried on through the medium of the deputies, who first arrived in London to claim assistance, was now placed upon a regular footing. The deputies, at the desire of Mr. Canning, were recalled, and admiral Apodaca was appointed envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary at St. James’s, and Mr. John Hookham Frere was accredited, with the same diplomatic rank, near the central junta.
Mr. Stuart, whose knowledge of the state of the country, whose acquaintance with the character of the leading persons, and whose able and energetic exertions had so much contributed to the formation of a central government, was superseded by this injudicious appointment, and thus a great political machine, with every wheel in violent action, was, at the critical moment, left without any controlling power or guiding influence; for Mr. Stuart, who, on his own responsibility, had quitted Coruña, and repaired to Madrid, and had remitted the most exact and important information of what was passing, remained for three months without receiving a single line from Mr. Canning, approving or disapproving of his proceedings, or giving him instructions how to act at this important crisis: a strange remissness, indicating the bewildered state of the ministers, who slowly and with difficulty followed, when they should have been prepared to lead. Their tardy abortive measures demonstrated, how wide the space between a sophist and a statesman, and how dangerous to a nation is that public feeling which, insatiable of words, disregards the actions of men, esteeming more the interested eloquence and wit of an orator like Demades, than the simple integrity, sound judgment, and great exploits, of a general like Phocion.
Such were the preparations made by Spain in September and October, to meet the exigencies of a period replete with danger and difficulty. It would be instructive to contrast the exertions of the “enthusiastic Spaniards” during these three months of their insurrection, with the efforts of “discontented France,” in the hundred days of Napoleon’s second reign. The junta were, however, not devoid of ambition, for even before the battle of Baylen, that of Seville was occupied with a project of annexing the Algarves to Spain, and the treaty of Fontainebleau was far from being considered as a dead letter.