History of the war in the Peninsula and in the south of France from the year 1807 to the year 1814, vol. 5

by William Francis Patrick Napier

When the parliament met, lord Wellesley undertook, and did very clearly show, that if the successes in the early part of the year had not been, by his brother, pushed to the extent expected, and had been followed by important reverses, the causes were clearly to be traced to the imbecile administration of Mr. Perceval and his coadjutors, whose policy he truly characterized as having in it “nothing regular but confusion.” With a very accurate knowledge of facts he discussed the military question, and maintained that twelve thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry, added to the army in the beginning of the year, would have rendered the campaign decisive, because the Russian contest, the incapacity of Joseph, and the dissentions of the French generals in Spain, had produced the most favourable crisis for striking a vital blow at the enemy’s power. The cabinet were aware of this, and in good time, but though there were abundance of soldiers idling at home, when the welfare of the state required their presence in the Peninsula, nay, although the ministers had actually sent within five thousand as many men as were necessary, they had, with the imbecility which marked all their proceedings, so contrived, that few or none should reach the theatre of war until the time for success had passed away. Then touching upon the financial question, with a rude hand he tore to pieces the minister’s pitiful pretexts, that the want of specie had necessarily put bounds to their efforts, and that the general himself did not complain. “No!” exclaimed lord Wellesley, “he does not complain because it is the sacred duty of a soldier not to complain. But he does not say that with greater means he could not do greater things, and his country will not be satisfied if these means are withheld by men, who having assumed the direction of affairs in such a crisis, have only incapacity to plead in extenuation of their failures.”

This stern accuser was himself fresh from the ministry, versed in state matters, and of unquestionable talents; he was well acquainted with the actual resources and difficulties of the moment; he was sincere in his opinions because he had abandoned office rather than be a party to such a miserable mismanagement of England’s power; he was in fine no mean authority against his former colleagues, even though the facts did not so clearly bear him out in his views.

That England possessed the troops and that they were wanted by Wellington is undeniable. Even in September there were still between fifty and sixty thousand soldiers present under arms at home, and that any additional force could have been fed in Portugal is equally beyond doubt, because the reserve magazines contained provisions for one hundred thousand men for nine months. The only questionWellington’s Correspondence, MSS. then was the possibility of procuring enough of specie to purchase those supplies which could not be had on credit. Lord Wellington had indeed made the campaign almost without specie, and a small additional force would certainly not have overwhelmed his resources; but setting this argument aside, what efforts, what ability, what order, what arrangements were made by the government to overcome the difficulties of the time? Was there less extravagance in the public offices, the public works, public salaries, public contracts? The very snuff-boxes and services of plate given to diplomatists, the gorgeous furniture of palaces, nay the gaudy trappings wasted on Whittingham’s, Roche’s, and Downie’s divisions, would almost have furnished the wants of the additional troops demanded by lord Wellesley. Where were all the millions lavished in subsidies to the Spaniards, where the millions which South America had transmitted to Cadiz, where those sums spent by the soldiers during the war? Real money had indeed nearly disappeared from England, and a base paper had usurped its place; but gold had not disappeared from the world, and an able ministry would have found it. These men only knew how to squander.

The subsidy granted to Portugal was paid by the commercial speculation of lord Wellington and Mr. Stuart, speculations which also fed theStuart’s Correspondence, MSS. army, saved the whole population of Portugal from famine, and prevented the war from stopping in 1811; and yet so little were the ministers capable even of understanding, much less of making such arrangements, that they now rebuked their general for having adopted them and after their own imbecile manner insisted upon a new mode of providing supplies. Every movement they made proved their incapacity. They had permitted lord William Bentinck to engage in the scheme of invading Italy when additional troops were wanted in Portugal; and they suffered him to bid, in the money-market, against lord Wellington, and thus sweep away two millions of dollars at an exorbitant premium, for a chimera, when the war in the Peninsula was upon the point of stopping altogether in default of that very money which Wellington could have otherwise procured—nay, had actually been promised at a reasonable cost. Nor was this the full measure of their folly.

Lord Wellesley affirmed, and they were unable to deny the fact, that dollars might have been obtained from South America to any amount, if the government would have consented to pay the market-price for them; they would not do it, and yet afterwards sought to purchase the same dollars at a higher rate in the European markets. He told them, and they could not deny it, that they had empowered five different agents, to purchase dollars for five different services, without any controlling head; that these independent agents were bidding against each other in every money-market, and the restrictions as to the price were exactly in the inverse proportion to the importance of the service: the agent for the troops in Malta was permitted to offer the highest price, lord Wellington was restricted to the lowest. And besides this folly lord Wellesley shewed that they had, under their licensing system, permitted French vessels to bring French goods, silks and gloves, to England, and to carry bullion away in return. Napoleon thus paid his army in Spain with the very coin which should have subsisted the English troops.

Incapable however as the ministers were of making the simplest arrangements; neglecting, as they did, the most obvious means of supplying the wants of the army; incapable even, as we have seen, of sending out a few bales of clothing and arms for the Spaniards without producing the utmost confusion, they were heedless of the counsels of their general, prompt to listen to every intriguing adviser, and ready to plunge into the most absurd and complicated measures, to relieve that distress which their own want of ability had produced. When the war with the United States broke out, a war provoked by themselves, they suffered the Admiralty, contrary to the wishes of Mr. Stuart, to reduce the naval force at Lisbon, and to neglect Wellington’s express recommendation as to the stationing of ships for the protection of the merchantmen bringing flour and stores to Portugal. Thus the American privateers, being unmolested, run down the coast of Africa, intercepted the provision trade from the Brazils, which was one of the principal resources of the army, and then, emboldened by impunity, infested the coast of Portugal, captured fourteen ships loaded with flour off the Douro, and a large vessel in the very mouth of the Tagus. These things happened also when the ministers were censuring and interfering with the general’s commercial transactions, and seeking to throw the feeding of his soldiers into the hands of British speculators; as if the supply of an army was like that of a common market! never considering that they thus made it the merchant’s interest to starve the troops with a view to increase profits; never considering that it was by that very commerce, which they were putting an end to, that the general had paid the Portuguese subsidy for them, and had furnished his own military chest with specie, when their administrative capacity was quite unequal to the task.

Never was a government better served than the British government was by lord Wellington and Mr. Stuart. With abilities, vigilance, and industry seldom equalled, they had made themselves masters of all that related to the Portuguese policy, whether foreign or domestic, military, or civil, or judicial. They knew all the causes of mischief, they had faithfully represented them both to the Portuguese and British governments, and had moreover devised effectual remedies. But the former met them with the most vexatious opposition, and the latter, neglecting their advice, lent themselves to those foolish financial schemes which I have before touched upon as emanating from Mr. Villiers, Mr. Vansittart, and the count of Funchal. The first had been deficient as an ambassador and statesman, the second was universally derided as a financier, and the third, from his long residence in London, knew very little of the state of Portugal, had derived that little from the information of his brother, the restless Principal Souza, and in all his schemes had reference only to his own intrigues in the Brazils. Their plans were necessarily absurd. Funchal revived the old project of an English loan, and in concert with his coadjutors desired to establish a bank after the manner of the English institution; and they likewise advanced a number of minor details and propositions, most of which had been before suggested by Principal Souza and rejected by lord Wellington, and all of which went to evade, not to remedy the evils. Finally they devised, and the English cabinet actually entertained the plan, of selling the crown and church property of Portugal. This spoliation of the Catholic church was to be effected by commissioners, one of whom was to be Mr. Sydenham, an Englishman and a Protestant; and as it was judged that the pope would not readily yield his consent, they resolved to apply to his nuncio, who being in their power they expected to find more pliable.

Having thus provided for the financial difficulties of Portugal, the ministers turned their attention to the supply of the British army, and in the same spirit concocted what they called a modified system of requisitions after the manner of the French armies! Their speeches, their manifestoes, their whole scheme of policy, which in the working had nearly crushed the liberties of England and had plunged the whole world into war; that policy whose aim and scope was, they said, to support established religion, the rights of monarchs, and the independence of nations, was now disregarded or forgotten. Yes, these men, to remove difficulties caused by their own incapacity and negligence, were ready to adopt all that they had before condemned and reviled in the French; they were eager to meddle, and in the most offensive manner, with the catholic religion, by getting from the nuncio, who was in their power, what they could not get from the pope voluntarily; they were ready to interfere with the rights of the Portuguese crown by selling its property, and finally they would have adopted that system of requisitions which they had so often denounced as rendering the very name of France abhorrent to the world.

All these schemes were duly transmitted to lord Wellington and to Mr. Stuart, and the former had, in the field, to unravel the intricacies, to detect the fallacies, and to combat the wild speculations of men, who, in profound ignorance of facts, were giving a loose to their imaginations on such complicated questions of state. It was while preparing to fight Marmont that he had to expose the futility of relying upon a loan; it was on the heights of San Christoval, on the field of battle itself, that he demonstrated the absurdity of attempting to establish a Portuguese bank; it was in the trenches of Burgos that he dissected Funchal’s and Villiers’s schemes of finance, and exposed the folly of attempting the sale of church property; it was at the termination of the retreat that with a mixture of rebuke and reasoning he quelled the proposal to live by forced requisitions; and on each occasion he shewed himself as well acquainted with these subjects as he was with the mechanism of armies.

Reform abuses, raise your actual taxes with vigour and impartiality, pay your present debt before you contract a new one, was his constant reply to the propositions for loans. And when the English ministers pressed the other plans, which, besides the bank, included a recoinage of dollars into cruzados, in other words the depreciation of the silver standard, he with an unsparing hand laid their folly bare. The military and political state of Portugal he said was such that no man in his senses, whether native or foreigner, would place his capital where he could not withdraw it at a moment’s notice. When Massena invaded that country unreasonable despondency had prevailed amongst the ministers, and now they seemed to have a confidence as wild as their former fear; but he who knew the real state of affairs; he who knew the persons that were expected to advance money; he who knew the relative forces of the contending armies, the advantages and disadvantages attending each; he who knew the absolute weakness of the Portuguese frontier as a line of defence, could only laugh at the notion that the capitalists would take gold out of their own chests to lodge it in the chests of the bank and eventually in those of the Portuguese treasury, a treasury deservedly without credit. The French armies opposed to him in the field (he was then on San Christoval) were, he said, just double his own strength, and a serious accident to Ballesteros, a rash general with a bad army, would oblige the Anglo-Portuguese force to retire into Portugal and the prospects of the campaign would vanish; and this argument left out of the question any accident which might happen to himself or general Hill. Portugal would, he hoped, be saved but its security was not such as these visionaries would represent it.