May. In the Madeiras the authorities vexatiously prevented the English money agents from exporting specie, and their conduct was approved of at Rio Janeiro. At Bisao, in Africa, the troops had mutinied for want of pay, and in the Cape de Verde Islands disturbances arose from the over-exaction of taxes; for when the people were weak, the regency were vigorous; pliant only to the powerful. These commotions were trifling and soon ended of themselves, yet expeditions were sent against the offenders in both places, and the troops thus employed immediately committed far worse excesses, and did more mischief than that which they were sent to suppress. At the same time several French frigates finding the coast of Africa unguarded, cruized successfully against the Brazil trade, and aided the American privateers to contract the already too straitened resources of the army.
Amidst all these difficulties however the extraordinary exertions of the British officers had restored the numbers, discipline, and spirit of the Portuguese army. Twenty-seven thousand excellent soldiers were again under arms and ready to commence the campaign, although the national discontent was daily increasing; and indeed the very feeling of security created by the appearance of such an army rendered the citizens at large less willing to bear the inconveniences of the war. Distant danger never affects the multitude, and the billetting of troops, who, from long habits of war, little regarded the rights of the citizens in comparison with their own necessities, being combined with requisitions, and with a recruiting system becoming every year more irksome, formed an aggregate of inconveniences intolerable to men who desired ease and no longer dreaded to find an enemy on their hearth-stones. The powerful classes were naturally more affected than the poorer classes, because of their indolent habits; but their impatience was aggravated because they had generally been debarred of the highest situations, or supplanted, by the British interference in the affairs of the country, and, unlike those of Spain, the nobles of Portugal had lost little or none of their hereditary influence. Discontent was thus extended widely, and moreover the old dread of French power was entirely gone; unlimited confidence in the strength and resources of England had succeeded; and this confidence, to use the words of Mr. Stuart, “being opposed to the irregularities which have been practised by individuals, and to the difference of manners, and of religion, placed the British in the singular position of a class whose exertions were necessary for the country, but who, for the above reasons, were in every other respect as distinct from the natives as persons with whom, from some criminal cause, it was necessary to suspend communication.”—Hence he judged that the return of the prince-regent would be a proper epoch for the British to retire from all situations in Portugal not strictly military, for if any thing should delay that event, the time was approaching when the success of the army and the tranquillity of the country would render it necessary to yield to the first manifestations of national feeling. In fine, notwithstanding the great benefits conferred upon the Portuguese by the British, the latter were, and it will always be so on the like occasions, regarded by the upper classes as a captain regards galley-slaves, their strength was required to speed the vessel, but they were feared and hated.
The prince-regent did not return to Portugal according to Wellington’s advice, but Carlotta immediately prepared to come alone; orders were given to furnish her apartments in the different palaces, and her valuable effects had actually arrived. Ill health was the pretext for the voyage, but the real object was to be near Spain to forward her views upon the government there; for intent upon mischief, indefatigable and of a violence approaching insanity, she had sold even her plate and jewels to raise money wherewith to corrupt the leading members of the cortez, and was resolved, if that should not promise success, to distribute the money amongst the Spanish partidas, and so create a powerful military support for her schemes. Fortunately the prince dreading the intriguing advisers of his wife would not suffer her to quit Rio Janeiro until the wish of the British cabinet upon the subject was known, and that was so decidedly adverse, that it was thought better to do without the prince himself than to have him accompanied by Carlotta; so they both remained in the Brazils, and this formidable cloud passed away, yet left no sunshine on the land.
It was at this period that the offer of a Russian auxiliary force, before alluded to, being made to Wellington by admiral Grieg, was accepted by him to the amount of fifteen thousand men, and yet was not fulfilled because the Russian ambassador in London declared that the emperor knew nothing of it! Alexander however proposed to mediate in the dispute between Great Britain and America, but the English ministers, while lauding him as a paragon of magnanimity and justice, in regard to the war against Napoleon, remembered the armed neutrality and quadruple alliance, and wisely declined trusting England’s maritime pretensions to his faithless grasping policy. Neither would they listen to Austria, who at this time, whether with good faith or merely as a cloak I know not, desired to mediate a general peace. However, amidst this political confusion the progress of the military preparations was visible; and contemporary with the Portuguese, the Spanish troops under Wellington’s influence and providence acquired more consistence than they had ever before possessed; a mighty power was in arms; but the flood of war with which the English general finally poured into Spain, and the channels by which he directed the overwhelming torrent, must be reserved for another place. It is now time to treat of the political situation of king Joseph, and to resume the narrative of that secondary warfare which occupied the French armies while Wellington was uninterruptedly as far as the enemy were concerned, reorganizing his power.
CHAPTER III.
1813. In war it is not so much the positive strength, as the relative situations of the hostile parties, which gives the victory. Joseph’s position, thus judged, was one of great weakness, principally because he was incapable of combining the materials at his disposal, or of wielding them when combined by others. France had been suddenly thrown by her failure in Russia, into a new and embarrassing attitude, more embarrassing even than it appeared to her enemies, or than her robust warlike proportions, nourished by twelve years of victory, indicated. Napoleon, the most indefatigable and active of mankind, turned his enemy’s ignorance on this head to profit; for scarcely was it known that he had reached Paris by that wise, that rapid journey, from Smorghoni, which, baffling all his enemies’ hopes, left them only the power of foolish abuse; scarcely I say, was his arrival at Paris known to the world, than a new and enormous army, the constituent parts of which he had with his usual foresight created while yet in the midst of victory, was in march from all parts to unite in the heart of Germany.
On this magical rapidity he rested his hopes to support the tottering fabric of his empire; but well aware of the critical state of his affairs, his design was, while presenting a menacing front on every side, so to conduct his operations that if he failed in his first stroke, he might still contract his system gradually and without any violent concussion. And good reason for hope he had. His military power was rather broken and divided than lessened, for it is certain that the number of men employed in 1813 was infinitely greater than in 1812; in the latter four hundred thousand, but in the former more than seven hundred thousand men, and twelve hundred field-pieces were engaged on different points, exclusive of the armies in Spain. Then on the Vistula, on the Oder, on the Elbe, he had powerful fortresses, and numerous garrisons, or rather armies, of strength and goodness to re-establish his ascendancy in Europe, if he could reunite them in one system by placing a new host victoriously in the centre of Germany. And thus also he could renew the adhesive qualities of those allies, who still clung to him though evidently feeling the attraction of his enemies’ success.
But this was a gigantic contest, for his enemies, by deceiving their subjects with false promises of liberty, had brought whole nations against him. More than eight hundred thousand men were in arms in Germany alone; secret societies were in full activity all over the continent; and in France a conspiracy was commenced by men who desired rather to see their country a prey to foreigners and degraded with a Bourbon king, than have it independent and glorious under Napoleon. Wherefore that great monarch had now to make application, on an immense scale, of the maxim which prescribes a skilful offensive as the best defence, and he had to sustain two systems of operation not always compatible; the one depending upon moral force to hold the vast fabric of his former policy together, the other to meet the actual exigencies of the war. The first was infinitely more important than the last, and as Germany and France were the proper theatres for its display, the Spanish contest sunk at once from a principal into an accessary war. Yet this delicate conjuncture of affairs made it of vital importance, that Napoleon should have constant and rapid intelligence from Spain, because the ascendancy, which he yet maintained over the world by his astounding genius, might have been broken down in a moment if Wellington, overstepping the ordinary rules of military art, had suddenly abandoned the Peninsula, and thrown his army, or a part of it into France. For then would have been deranged all the emperor’s calculations; then would the defection of all his allies have ensued; then would he have been obliged to concentrate both his new forces and his Spanish troops for the defence of his own country, abandoning all his fortresses and his still vast though scattered veteran armies in Germany and Poland, to the unrestrained efforts of his enemies beyond the Rhine. Nothing could have been more destructive to Napoleon’s moral power, than to have an insult offered and commotions raised on his own threshold at the moment when he was assuming the front of a conqueror in Germany.
To obviate this danger or to meet it, alike required that the armies in the Peninsula should adopt a new and vigorous system, under which, relinquishing all real permanent offensive movements, they should yet appear to be daring and enterprising, even while they prepared to abandon their former conquests. But the emperor wanted old officers and non-commissioned officers, and experienced soldiers, to give consistency to the young levies with which he was preparing to take the field, and he could only supply this want by drawing from the veterans of the Peninsula; wherefore he resolved to recal the division of the young guard, and with it many thousand men and officers of the line most remarkable for courage and conduct. In lieu he sent the reserve at Bayonne into Spain, replacing it with another, which was again to be replaced in May by further levies; and besides this succour, twenty thousand conscripts were appropriated for the Peninsula.