I have said that it was a favourite maxim with the regency that a paternal government should not punish delinquents in the public service, and they added to this another still more absurd, namely, that the Portuguese troops could thrive under privations of food, which would kill men of another nation; with these two follies they excused neglect, whenever the repetition, that there had been no neglect, became fatiguing to them. Besides this, collisions between the British commissariat and the “junta de viveres” were frequent and very hurtful, because the former able to outbid, and more in fear of failure, overbought the latter; this contracted the already too small sphere of their activity, and lord Wellington was prevented feeding the whole Portuguese army himself by a curious obstacle. His principal dependance for the support of his own troops was upon the Spanish muleteers attached to the army, they were the very life and sustenance of the war, and their patience, hardiness, and fidelity to the British were remarkable; but they so abhorred the Portuguese people that they would not carry provisions for their soldiers, and lord Wellington only obtained their services, for those brigades which were attached to the English divisions, by making them think the food was entirely for the latter. Upon such nice management even in apparently trifling matters did this war depend. And yet it is not uncommon for politicians, versed only in the classic puerilities of public schools, and the tricks of parliamentary faction, to hold the rugged experience of Wellington’s camp as nothing in the formation of a statesman.
The effects of these complicated affairs were soon and severely felt. Abrantes had like to have been abandoned, from want, at the time Massena held Santarem, and the Portuguese troops were starved during that general’s retreat; Beresford’s operations in the Alemtejo were impeded, and his hospitals were left without succour; at Fuentes Onoro ammunition failed, and the Portuguese artillery were forced to supply themselves by picking up the enemy’s bullets; the cavalry of that nation were quite ruined, and out of more than forty thousand regular troops, formed by Beresford, only nineteen thousand were to be found under arms after the battle of Albuera, the rest had deserted or died from extreme want.
When Massena retreated the provincial organization of the country was restored, and to encourage the people to sow the devastated districts before the season passed, Mr. Stuart had furnished seed corn on the credit of the coming subsidy; an amnesty for deserters was also published, the feudal imposts for the year were remitted, and fairs were established to supply tools of husbandry; but notwithstanding these efforts, such was the distress, that at Caldas eighty persons died daily, and at Figueras where twelve thousand people, chiefly from Portuguese Estremadura, had taken refuge, the daily deaths were above a hundred, and the whole would have perished but for the active benevolence of major Von Linstow, an officer of general Trant’s staff. Meanwhile the country was so overrun with robbers that the detached officers could not travel in safety upon the service of the army, and Wellington was fearful of being obliged to employ his troops against them. British officers were daily insulted at Lisbon, and even assassinated while on duty with impunity; the whole army was disgusted, the letters to England were engendering in that country a general dislike to the war, and the British soldiers, when not with their regiments, committed a thousand outrages on the line of operations.
As a climax to these scenes of misery and mischief, the harvest which had failed in Portugal, failed also in England; and no corn was to be got from the Baltic because there was no specie to pay for it, and bills were refused. Hence the famine spread in a terrible manner until Mr. Stuart obtained leave to license fifty American vessels with corn, whose cargoes were paid for out of funds provided partly by the charity of the people of England, and partly by a parliamentary grant which passed when Massena retreated.
In this crisis the British cabinet granted an additional subsidy to Portugal, but from the scarcity of specie, the greatest part of it was paid in kind, and the distress of the regency for money was scarcely lessened; for these supplies merely stood in the place of the plunder which had hitherto prevailed in the country. Thus Mr. Canning’s prodigality, Mr. Vansittart’s paper system, and Mr. Perceval’s economy, all combined to press upon the British general, and to use his own words, he was supplied with only one-sixth part of the money necessary to keep the great machine going which had been set in motion. Mr. Perceval however, in answer to his remonstrances, employed a secretary of the Treasury to prove in a laboured paper, founded entirely upon false data, that the army had been over-supplied, and must have money to spare. But that minister, whose speeches breathed nothing but the final destruction of France, designed to confine the efforts of England to the defence of Portugal alone, without any regard to the rest of the Peninsula.
Amongst the other follies of the Portuguese regency was a resolution to issue proclamations, filled with bombastic adulation of themselves, vulgar abuse of the French, and altogether unsuited to the object of raising the public feeling, which flagged under their system. To the English general’s remonstrances on this head, Forjas replied, that praise of themselves and abuse of the French, was the national custom, and could not be dispensed with! a circumstance which certain English writers who have implicitly followed the accounts of the Portuguese authors, such as Accursio de Neves, and men of his stamp, relative to French enormities, would do well to consider. And here it is right to observe, that so many complaints were made of the cruelty committed by Massena’s army while at Santarem, that lord Wellington had some thoughts of reprisals; but having first causedMr. Stuart’s papers, MSS. strict inquiry to be made, it was discovered that in most cases, the ordenança, after having submitted to the French, and received their protection, took advantage of it to destroy the stragglers and small detachments, and the cruelty complained of was only the infliction of legitimate punishment for such conduct: the projected retaliation was therefore changed for an injunction to the ordenanças to cease from such a warfare.
The character of the regency was, however, most openly shewn in their proceedings connected with the convention of Cintra. All the advantages which that treaty ensured to Portugal, they complacently reaped, but overlooked or annulled those points in which the character of England was concerned. In violation of the convention, and in despite of the remonstrances of lord Wellington and Mr. Stuart, they cast the French residents at Lisbon into loathsome dungeons, without any cause of complaint; and in the affair of Mascarheñas their conduct was distinguished alike by wanton cruelty and useless treachery. This youth, when only fifteen, had with many others entered the French service in Junot’s time, under the permission of his own prince; and he and the Conde de Sabugal, were taken by the peasantry in 1810 endeavouring to pass from Massena’s army into Spain, Sabugal in uniform, Mascarheñas in disguise. They were both tried as traitors. The first, a general officer, and with powerful friends amongst the Fidalgos, was acquitted, as indeed was only just; but he was then appointed to a situation under the regency, which was disgraceful, as arising from faction: Mascarheñas was a boy, and had no powerful friends, and he was condemned to death. Lord Wellington and Mr. Stuart represented the injustice of this sentence, and they desired that if humanity was unheeded the government would put him to death as a spy, for being in disguise, and so prevent the danger of reprisals, already threatened by Massena. The young man’s mother and sisters, grovelling in the dust, implored the regency to spare him, but to shew their hatred of lord Wellington and Mr. Stuart, for the disputes with the regency were then highest, the government told the miserable women, that it was the British general and minister who demanded his death, and they were sent, with this brutal falsehood, to weep and to ask grace from persons who had no power to grant it. Mascarheñas was publicly executed as a traitor, for entering the French service under the authority of his native prince, while Sabugal was acquitted, and even rewarded, although precisely in the same circumstances, when the excuse of the disguise had been rejected.
In 1810 one Corea, calling himself an aide-de-camp of Massena, was likewise seized in disguise within the British lines, and, having given useful information, was by lord Wellington confined in St. Julians, to protect him from the Portuguese government. After a time he became deranged, and was released, whereupon the regency, rather than keep him, desired that he might be sent as a prisoner of war to England; thus for convenience admitting the very principle which they had rejected when only honour and humanity were concerned. A process against the marquis d’Alorna had also been commenced, but his family being powerful it was soon dropped, and yet the government refused madame d’Alorna leave to join her husband, thus shewing themselves spiteful and contemptible as well as cowardly and bloody. Even the court of Brazil was shocked. The prince rebuked the regency severely for the death of Mascarheñas, reversed the sentences on some others, and banished Sabugal to Terceira.
This was the political state of Portugal.