“Then what is more extraordinary and more difficult to understand is a transaction which occurred lately at Fuenterabia. It was settled that the British and Portuguese hospitals should go to that town. There is a building there which has been a Spanish hospital, and the Spanish authority who gave it over wanted to carry off, in order to burn as fire-wood, the beds, that our soldiers might not have the use of them; and these are people to whom we have given medicines instruments and other aids, who when wounded and sick we have taken into our hospitals, and to whom we have rendered every service in our power after having recovered their country from the enemy! These are not the people of Spain but the officers of government, who would not dare to conduct themselves in this manner if they did not know that their conduct was agreeable to their employers. If this spirit is not checked, if we do not show that we are sensible of the injury done to our characters, and of the injustice and unfriendly nature of such proceedings, we must expect that the people at large will soon behave towards us in the same manner, and that we shall have no friend or none who will dare to avow him as such in Spain. Consider what will be the consequence of this state of affairs if any reverse should happen, or if an aggravation of the insults and injuries or any other cause should cause the English army to be withdrawn. I think I should experience great difficulty, the Spanish people being hostile, in retiring through Spain into Portugal from the peculiar nature of our equipments, and I think I might be able to embark the army at Passages in spite of all the French and Spanish armies united. But I should be much more certain of getting clear off as we ought if we had possession of San Sebastian, and this view of the subject is the motive for the advice I am about to give you as the remedy for the evils with which I have made you acquainted.
“First then I recommend to you to alter the nature of your political relations with Spain and to have nothing there but a “chargé d’affaires.” Secondly to complain seriously of the conduct of the government and their servants, to remind them that Cadiz, Carthagena, and I believe, Ceuta, were garrisoned by British troops at their earnest request, and that the troops were not sent to the two former till the government agreed to certain conditions. If we had not garrisoned the last it would before now have fallen into the hands of the Moors. Thirdly to demand, as security for the safety of the king’s troops against the criminal disposition of the government and of those in authority under them, that a British garrison should be admitted into San Sebastian, giving notice that unless this demand was complied with the troops should be withdrawn. Fourthly. To withdraw the troops if this demand be not complied with, be the consequences what they may, and to be prepared accordingly. You may rely upon this, that if you take a firm decided line and shew your determination to go through with it, you will have the Spanish nation with you, and will bring the government to their senses, and you will put an end at once to all the petty cabals and counter-action existing at the present moment, and you will not be under the necessity of bringing matters to extremities; if you take any other than a decided line and one which in its consequences will involve them in ruin you may depend upon it you will gain nothing and will only make matters worse. I recommend these measures whatever may be the decision respecting my command of the army. They are probably the more necessary if I should keep my command. The truth is that a crisis is approaching in our connection with Spain and if you do not bring the government and nation to their senses before they go too far, you will inevitably lose all the advantages which you might expect from services rendered to them.”
Thus it appears that lord Wellington at the end of the war described the Spaniards precisely as sir John Moore described them at the beginning. But the seat of government was now transferred to Madrid and the new Cortez, as I have already noticed, decided, against the wishes of the regency, that the English general should keep the command of the Spanish armies. The liberals indeed with great diligence had previously sought to establish a system of controul over the Cortez by means of the populace of Madrid as they had done at Cadiz, and they were so active and created so much alarm by their apparent success, that the serviles, backed by the Americans, were ready to make the princess Carlotta sole regent as the only resource for stemming the progress of democracy. However when they had proved their strength upon the question of lord Wellington’s command, they deferred the princess’s affair and resolved to oppose their adversaries more vigorously in the assembly. They were encouraged also by a tumult which happened at Madrid, where the populace instigated by their agents, or disliking the new constitution, for the measures of the democratic party were generally considered evil in the great towns beyond the Isla, rose and forced the authorities to imprison a number of obnoxious persons; the new Cortez then arrived, the serviles got the upper hand and being resolved to change the regency took as their ground of attack its conduct towards the English general. Pursuing this scheme of opposition with ardour they caused the minister of war to be dismissed, and were ready to attack the regency itself, expecting full success, when to their amazement and extreme anger lord Wellington, far from desiring to have his personal enemies thus thrust out of power, expressed his earnest desire to keep them in their stations.
To men who were alike devoid of patriotism or principle, and whose only rule of action was the momentary impulse of passion, such a proceeding was incomprehensible; yet it was a wise and well-considered political change on his part, shewing that private feelings were never the guides of his conduct in public matters, and that he ever seemed to bear in mind the maxim which Sophocles has put into the mouth of Ajax, “carrying himself towards his friends as if they might one day become enemies and treating his foes as men who might become friends.” The new spirit had given him no hopes of any general alteration of the system, nor was he less convinced that sooner or later he must come to extremities with the Spaniards; but he was averse to any appearance of disunion becoming public at the moment he was invading France, lest it should check his projects of raising an anti-Napoleon party in that country. He therefore advised the British government to keep his hostile propositions in abeyance, leaving it to him and to his brother to put them in execution or not as events might dictate. Meanwhile he sent orders to evacuate Cadiz and Carthagena, and opposed the projected change in the Spanish government, observing that “the minister of war being dismissed, the most obnoxious opponent of military arrangement was gone; that the mob of Madrid, being worked upon by the same press in the hands of the same people who had made the mob of Cadiz so ungovernable, would become as bad as these last, and though the mercantile interest would not have so much power in the capital they would not want partizans when desirous of carrying a question by violence. The grandees were too poor to retain their former natural influence, and the constitution gave them no political power. The only chance which the serviles had was to conduct themselves with prudence, and when in the right with a firm contempt for the efforts of the press and the mob; but this was what no person in Spain ever did and the smaller party being wiser bolder and more active would soon govern the Cortez at Madrid as they did that at Cadiz.”
No permanent change for the better could be expected, and meanwhile the actual government, alarmed by the tumults in the capital, by the strength of the serviles in the Cortez, by the rebukes and remonstrances of the English general and ministers, and by the evident danger of an open rupture with England, displayed, according to lord Wellington, the utmost prudence and fairness in a most important affair which occurred at this time. That is to say, their own views and interests coinciding with those of the English commander and government there was a momentary agreement, and Wellington wisely preferred this opening for conciliation to the more dangerous mode he had before recommended.
The event which called forth his approval of their conduct was the secret arrival of the duke of San Carlos at Madrid in December. He brought with him a treaty of peace, proposed by Napoleon and accepted by Ferdinand, called the treaty of Valençay. It acknowledged Ferdinand as king of Spain and the Indies, and the integrity of the Spanish empire was recognized. He was in return to make the English evacuate Spain, and the French troops were to abandon the country at the same time. The contracting powers were to maintain their respective maritime rights as they had been stipulated by the treaty of Utrecht and observed until 1792. The sales of the national domains made by Joseph were to be confirmed; all the Spaniards who had attached themselves to the French cause were to be reinstated in their dignities and property, those who chose to quit Spain were to have ten years to dispose of their possessions. Prisoners, including all those delivered up by Spain to the English, were to be sent home on both sides. The king was to pay annually thirty millions of reals to his father Charles IV., and two millions to his widow; a treaty of commerce was to be arranged.
Ferdinand being entirely devoid of principle acted with that cunning which marked his infamous career through life. He gave the duke of San Carlos secret instructions to tell the serviles, if he found them all-powerful in the Cortez, to ratify this treaty with a secret resolution to break it when time served; but if the Jacobins were strongest San Carlos was merely to ask them to ratify it, Ferdinand in that case reserving to himself the task of violating it on his own authority. These instructions were made known to the English ministers and the English general, but they, putting no trust in such a negociator, and thinking his intention was rather to deceive the allies than Napoleon, thwarted him as much as they could, and in this they were joined by the PortugueseMr. Stuart’s Correspondence, MSS. government. The British authorities were naturally little pleased with the prospect of being forced to abandon Spain under a treaty, which would necessarily give Napoleon great influence over that country in after times, and for the present enable him to concentrate all the old troops on the eastern frontier of his empire; nor was the Jacobinical Spanish government more content to have a master. Wherefore, all parties being agreed, the regency, keeping the matter secret, dismissed San Carlos on the 8th of January with a copy of the decree passed by the Cortez, which rendered null and void all acts of Ferdinand while a prisoner, and forbad negociation for peace while a French army remained in the Peninsula. And that the king might fully understand them, they told him “the monster despotism had been driven from the throne of Spain.” Meanwhile Joseph Palafox, who had been a prisoner ever since the siege of Zaragoza, was by the French emperor first sent to Valençay, after which he was to follow San Carlos and he arrived at Madrid four days after the latter’s departure. But his negociations were equally fruitless with the regency, and in the secret sittings of the Cortez measures were discussed for watching the king’s movements and forcing him to swear to the constitution and to the Cortez before he passed the frontier.
Lord Wellington was alarmed at the treaty of Valençay. He had, he said, long suspected Napoleon would adopt such an expedient and if he had shewn less pride and more common sense it would have succeeded. This sarcasm was perhaps well applied to the measure as it appeared at the time, but the emperor’s real proceedings he was unacquainted with, and this splenetic ebullition only indicated his own vexation at approaching mischief, for he was forced to acknowledge that the project was not unlikely even then to succeed, because the misery of Spain was so great and so clearly to be traced to the views of the government and of the new constitution, that many persons must have been desirous to put an end to the general suffering under the sanction of this treaty. “If Napoleon,” he said, “had withdrawn the garrisons from Catalonia and Valencia and sent Ferdinand who must be as useless a person in France as he would probably be in Spain at once to the frontier, or into the Peninsula, peace would have been made or the war at least rendered so difficult as to be almost impracticable and without hope of great success.” Now this was precisely what Napoleon had designed, and it seems nearly certain that he contemplated the treaty of Valençay and the restoration of Ferdinand as early as the period of the battle of Vittoria, if not before.
The scheme was one which demanded the utmost secrecy, that it might be too sudden for the English influence to defeat it; the emperor had therefore arranged that Ferdinand should enter Spain early in November, that is at the very moment when it would have been most injurious to the English interest, because then the disputes in the Cortez between the serviles and Jacobins were most rancorous, and the hostility of the regencies both in Portugal and Spain towards the English general and English influence undisguised. Suchet had then also proved his superiority to the allies in Catalonia, and Soult’s gigantic lines being unessayed seemed impregnable. But in Napoleon’s council were persons seeking only to betray him. It was the great misfortune of his life to have been driven by circumstances to suffer such men as Talleyrand and Fouché, whose innate treachery has become proverbial, to meddle in his affairs or even to approach his court. Mischief of this kind, however, necessarily awaits men who like Napoleon and Oliver Cromwell have the courage to attempt after great convulsions and civil wars the rebuilding of the social edifice without spilling blood. Either to create universal abhorrence by their cruelty, or to employ the basest of men, the Talleyrands, Fouchés, and Monks, of revolutions, is their inevitable fate; and never can they escape the opposition, more dangerous still, of honest and resolute men, who unable to comprehend the necessity of the times see nothing but tyranny in the vigour which prevents anarchy.
The treaty of Valençay was too important a measure to escape the sagacity of the traitors around Napoleon, and when their opposition in the council and their secret insinuations proved unavailing to dissuade him from it, they divulged the secret to the partizans of the Bourbons. Taking advantage of the troubled state of public affairs which occupied the emperor’s time and distracted his attention, they contrived that Ferdinand’s emissaries should precede him to Madrid, and delayed his own departure until March when the struggle was at an end. Nevertheless the chances of success for this scheme, even in its imperfect execution, were so many and so alarming that lord Wellington’s sudden change from fierce enmity to a warm support of the regency, when he found it resolute and frank in its rejection of the treaty, although it created so much surprize and anger at the moment, cannot be judged otherwise than as the wise and prudent proceeding of a consummate statesman. Nor did he fail to point out to his own government the more distant as well as the immediate danger to England and Spain involved in this singularly complicated and important affair.