department of literature until the revival of national poetry by
Nascimento and Du Bocage, the Portuguese people remained, owing to the
Methuen treaty, on much more intimate terms with the English. The royal
family might hanker after matrimonial alliances with Spain, a great
minister, like Pombal, might resent the absorption of Portuguese trade
by England; but, for all that, the people felt how close were their
bonds with the English nation. Mention has been made of the influx of
English capital, of the wine merchants of Oporto, and the English
factory at Lisbon, and also of the power exercised by the English
ambassadors. But there was a closer bond than that; Portugal became the
sanitarium for England; it was to Portugal that the seekers after a
milder climate resorted as they would now do to the Riviera, and it was
to Lisbon that the great English novelist, Henry Fielding, to mention
but one of many invalids, was sent; it was in Lisbon that he died, and
he is buried in the cemetery of the English factory there. These were
the bonds that bound the two peoples together, and the Portuguese people
were justified in counting upon the armed help of England in the
terrible struggle which they were now to pass through.
[Illustration: text decoration]
[Illustration: text decoration]
XVII.
THE ERA OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION--THE PENINSULAR WAR.
When Dom John took the government of Portugal into his hands in 1792,
popular attention was concentrated throughout Europe on the progress of
the French Revolution. The interest excited in Portugal was as great as
it was everywhere else, for the ideas, which were at the bottom of the
most important movement of modern times, had been eagerly received in
the literary circles of Lisbon. It is absurd to suppose that there was
any great democratic party in the country, for as long as the
administration was well carried on, and taxes were not oppressive, the
mass of the people were absolutely indifferent as to the nature of the
government. It was different with regard to the more educated classes,
who had been brought up in the doctrines of the encyclopædists, and who
had read Rousseau and Diderot, Voltaire and Montesquieu. These men were
sceptical about the advantages of a benevolent despotism; they had
studied the history of their own nation, and knew that in former days,
before the discovery of gold in Brazil, the Cortes had been frequently
summoned, and they desired that it should meet regularly, and that the
Portuguese people should once more take a part in legislation by means
of its old representative assembly. Some of them went further, and
inspired by the example of the great American Revolution, dreamed of a
republic, while others adopted all the fantastic political and social
ideas of Rousseau. But these men were mere theorists; they were to be
found only among a small circle of educated noblemen and bourgeois in
Lisbon and Oporto; and their fancies were quite unknown to the mass of
the population. These were the men who hailed with joy the capture of
the Bastille, and the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly, and who
openly expressed their sympathy with the new order of things in France.
[Illustration: A PORTUGUESE MERCHANT, WITH HIS WIFE AND MAID-SERVANT.
(_From Murphy’s “Travels in Portugal”, 1795._)]
The government failed to understand that these sympathizers would not be
able to follow the example of the French revolutionary leaders, so long
as the general population of Portugal was contented and happy, and like
all the absolutist monarchs of Europe, Dom John heard with the utmost
horror of the events passing in Paris, and feared that they would be
imitated in Lisbon. In his terror of the spread of “French principles,”
he began to persecute their admirers although they had never dreamed of
acting or conspiring, and he thus made martyrs of the holders of the new
opinions, which were only propagated the more rapidly by his tyrannical
behaviour. In his crusade against the sympathizers with the French
Revolution, Dom John found his chief ally in Diogo Ignacio de Pina
Manique, the Intendant of Police, who believed that by his vigour he
should obtain the ascendency formerly held by Pombal, and who proceeded
therefore to work upon his master’s fears. His first measure was to
issue an edict against aliens, under which he expelled two Frenchmen,
Pierre Noel and Pierre Louis Fontaine, and kept a strict and irritating
surveillance over Edward Church, the United States Consul, and Jacome
Ratton, a merchant of Lisbon, whom he declared to be the fomenters of
discontent and the leaders of a conspiracy. Against Portuguese subjects,
Pina Manique acted with still more severity; Francisco Coelho da Silva,
the father of Portuguese liberalism, was thrown into prison; other men
of letters were suspected and often prosecuted, including the poets,
Nascimento and Du Bocage, the botanist Avellar Brotero, and the
historian Correa da Serra; many noblemen of liberal principles were
watched by spies, and the Duke of Lafoẽs, the great patron of
literature, was expelled from Court, because he was a friend of
Broussonet, the French chemist. The men whom the Intendant of Police
most abhorred were the Freemasons whom he hated, because their society
was secret, and by his attempt to suppress all their lodges he made them
actively democratic, and the chief promoters of “French principles.” It
was no wonder that this conduct excited attention in France, and when in
January, 1793, three months after the proclamation of the French
Republic, the Girondin deputy, Kersaint, inveighed against England in
the Convention, he abused Portugal also, and spoke of that country as a
province of England.
Dom John, not satisfied with thus combating “French principles” at home,
believed it to be a holy duty to join in the general war against France,
and he therefore rejected the advice of the English ministry to remain
neutral, and sent his Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Luis Pinto
de Sousa Coutinho, to Madrid to beg leave to send an army to join in the
invasion of France. It need hardly be said that the Spanish minister,
the Count of Florida Blanca, was only too glad to accept assistance, and
a treaty of alliance between the two countries was signed at Aranjuez on
March 25, 1793. It was vain for the French revolutionary leaders to
protest that they had not injured Portugal and to ask for neutrality;
the French Ambassador, M. d’Arbaud, was ordered to leave Lisbon; a corps
of five thousand men under General João Forbes-Skelater was sent to join
the Spanish army in the invasion of Roussillon; and a squadron of eight
ships of war under the Marquis of Niza joined the English fleet in the
Mediterranean. The Portuguese contingent served gallantly in the Eastern
Pyrenees from November, 1793, to 1795, and shared alike in the success
of General Ricardos, and the defeats of General La Union and General
Urrutia, but nevertheless the Spanish Court under the influence of the
handsome but worthless guardsman, Godoy, did not hesitate to desert its
ally, and made a separate treaty with the French Republic at Basle in
July, 1795. Dom John began to believe that the war against the French
Republic could not be holy, since the Most Catholic king had made a
treaty with France, and he promptly sent Dom Diogo de Noronha to Paris
to sue for peace. But the Committee of Public Safety had no idea of
making terms with him; the treaties signed at Basle had been part of a
deliberate policy, which was to convert Prussia and Spain into allies of
the Republic, and to unite all three against Austria, England, and
Portugal, which was regarded as a province of England, and the
Portuguese ambassador was dismissed immediately. After the Convention
ceased its long session and the Directory was appointed, Dom John made
another effort for peace, and sent Antonio de Araujo de Azevedo, the
head of what may be called the French party at the Court of Lisbon, to
Paris. He met with no better reception than his predecessor, and when
after the treaty of San Ildefonso, by which Spain declared war against
England in 1796, came the news of a secret convention between the French
ambassador at Madrid, General Pérignon, and Godoy, Prince of the Peace,
by which Portugal was to be divided between those two powers, and
Spanish troops were being massed upon the Portuguese frontier, the
English party in the Portuguese ministry gained the upper hand, and
urgent supplications were sent to England for help.
Pitt and Grenville were only too glad to comply; for they regarded
Portugal as affording an important base of operations in the peninsula.
The House of Commons voted Portugal a subsidy of £200,000; a force of
six thousand men was despatched under the command of Major-General the
Honourable Sir Charles Stuart, which deterred the Spaniards from
attempting an invasion, and the Prince of Waldeck, like the Count of
Lippe-Buckeburg in former days, was sent to re-organize the Portuguese
army. This policy caused the French Directors to hesitate, and they
signed a treaty of peace with the Portuguese ambassador Antonio de
Araujo de Azevedo; but to their wrath and surprise, Dom John refused to
ratify the treaty, on which the Directors imprisoned the Portuguese
ambassador in the Temple. In the ardour of his alliance with England,
the prince for a year or two threw himself into the hands of the English
party at his Court, and on the death of Martinho de Mello e Castro, he
appointed Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, the leader of that party, to the
Secretaryship of State for the Marine and Colonies. Yet the English
party could not win the day entirely. The prince wavered; at his request
Sir Charles Stuart and the English army were withdrawn; and he made
another attempt to make peace with France through the mediation of
Spain. This was the situation of affairs when Dom John formally declared
himself Regent in 1799, as it became obvious that the Queen Maria
Francisca would never recover the use of her faculties; and in the same
year General Napoleon Bonaparte made his _coup d’état_ of the 18th
Brumaire, and became ruler of France with the title of First Consul.
The accession of Napoleon to power was of no advantage to Portugal; from
the very first he showed his hatred of the little country; no amount of
submission could win his friendship; he persisted in regarding Portugal,
as the Convention, the Committee of Public Safety, and the Directory had
done, as a province of England; and he thoroughly understood what an
important base of operations it afforded to the English armies. Hardly
was Napoleon firmly seated in office, when he despatched his brother
Lucien Bonaparte to Madrid in the year 1800 with directions to negotiate
with Portugal. He was to insist on the abandonment of the English
alliance, on the opening of Portuguese ports to France and the closing
of them to England, on the grant of special commercial advantages to
French merchants, on the extension of French Guiana to the Amazon, on
the cession of a part of Portugal to Spain until the recovery from the
English of Trinidad and Minorca, and on the payment of a large sum of
money, and he was authorized to offer Spain the assistance of French
troops if these hard terms were rejected. The Prince Regent did reject
them and declared war against Spain on February 10, 1801, and twenty-two
thousand French veterans at once entered the peninsula under the command
of Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, General Leclerc. The campaign was a very
short one; the French soldiers never came into action, but in the month
of May the Spaniards took Olivença, Juromenha, and Campo Mayor, laid
siege to Elvas, and defeated the Portuguese in two engagements at
Arronches and Flor da Rosa. The Portuguese sued for peace, and on June
6, 1801, a treaty was signed at Badajoz, by which Olivença and the
surrounding district was ceded to Spain, followed by another at Paris,
by which French Guiana was extended to the Amazon. Napoleon was very
dissatisfied with the peace of Badajoz, for he aimed at nothing short of
the extinction of the independence of Portugal, and it was many months
before he consented to ratify the treaties. Meanwhile an English force
under Colonel Henry Clinton had occupied Madeira, and a force of the
English East India Company’s troops garrisoned Goa. The pride of the
people of Portugal was deeply wounded by the loss of Olivença, which had
been an integral part of Portugal ever since the days of Affonso
Henriques, and they lost no opportunity of showing their contempt for
the Prince Regent and his advisers. Their wrath was kindled against the
French, and from this time forth, the mass of the people who did not
care for politics, but who did understand the meaning of national
disgrace, was ready to dare anything against the nation which had
brought about the disintegration of the fatherland.
The Treaty of Amiens gave Europe a moment’s breathing space; the English
evacuated Madeira, and the Prince Regent determined on a policy of
absolute neutrality. But Napoleon was not to be moved; he had determined
on the destruction of Portugal, and it was with the full expectation
that he would irritate the Portuguese into declaring war, that he sent
General Lannes, one of the most courageous, but one of the roughest and
least educated of his generals, as ambassador to Lisbon. Lannes acted in
accordance with the expectations of his chief; he insulted the
Portuguese Court; he failed to observe the most ordinary customs of
diplomatic courtesy; and he finally demanded the instant dismissal of
all the ministers who belonged to the English party, and especially of
Pina Manique, the Intendant of Police, because he had in former days
prosecuted the admirers of the French Revolution. The Prince Regent
obeyed, both from fear of France and dislike of the high-handed naval
policy of England; and Antonio de Araujo de Azevedo, the head of the
French party, became Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, with the
Count of Villa Verde, and the Viscount of Anadia as his colleagues, and
Lucas de Scabra da Silva succeeded Pina Manique. Even this humble and
prompt submission did not satisfy Napoleon, and in 1804 he replaced
General Lannes by General Junot whom he ordered to insist upon
Portugal’s declaring war against England. For a time, however, he
thought it wise to postpone his designs against the country, which he
regarded as the most vulnerable province of England, while he was
engaged in his great campaigns in Germany, and he even signed a treaty
of neutrality with the Portuguese Government. The English were not
inclined to submit to this, and in 1806, Admiral the Earl of St.
Vincent, General the Earl of Rosslyn, and General Simcoe were sent to
Lisbon to remind the Prince Regent of the ancient alliance between the
two countries, and to promise ample assistance if Portugal would declare
war against France. Dom John declined, and on the advice of his
ministers, treated the English ambassadors with something like contempt.
At length, in 1807, having defeated the armies of Austria, Prussia, and
Russia, Napoleon again turned his thoughts to his projects for the
annihilation of Portugal, which had become more than ever a thorn in his
side, since it refused to co-operate in his Continental System for the
commercial ruin of England. He resolved at first to act with Spain and
Godoy, as Pérignon and Lucien Bonaparte had done, and on the 29th of
October, 1807, he signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, by which it was
agreed that Portugal should be conquered by the combined armies of
France and Spain, and that the northern provinces of the country should
be given to the King of Etruria, in exchange for his Italian kingdom,
which Napoleon desired to annex, while the southern districts were to be
formed into an independent kingdom for Godoy, Prince of the Peace, and
the central provinces were to be held by France. The signature of this
treaty was followed by immediate action. Junot moved rapidly across
Spain with a French army, and in conjunction with a Spanish force, under
General Caraffa, invaded Portugal along the line of the Tagus, while
General Taranco and General Solano, with two other Spanish armies
occupied the Entre Minho e Douro and the Alemtejo. With amazing rapidity
Junot accomplished his march, and the Portuguese people hardly realized
that war was imminent, until on the 29th of November, Colonel Le Cor
rushed into Lisbon with the news that French soldiers were in possession
of Abrantes. This alarming intelligence completely unnerved the Prince
Regent, who listened to the strongly-worded advice of Sir Sidney Smith,
the commander of an English squadron in the Tagus, to abandon his
capital for Brazil, and to leave the English to defend Portugal. Dom
John believed this the best course to pursue, and after naming a Council
of Regency, he went on board an English ship with his wife, Donna
Carlotta Joaquina, his two sons, Dom Pedro and Dom Miguel, his six
daughters, and his unhappy mother, Queen Maria Francisca, whose
disordered brain seemed to understand what was going on, and whose
resistance to the efforts to remove her was painful to observe. The
English ships had hardly left their moorings in the Tagus, when Junot at
the head of two thousand wearied French soldiers, who had survived the
fearful fatigue of his rapid march, entered Lisbon on the 30th of
November, 1807.
[Illustration: MARSHAL JUNOT, DUKE OF ABRANTES.
(_From a Print of the period._)]
Nothing shows more certainly the great advance of what were called
“French principles”--that is to say, of democratic ideas--in Portugal
during the last few years, than the cordial reception which Junot
received. At Santarem he was welcomed by a deputation of the Freemasons
of Portugal, who had been made by persecution, as in other continental
countries, a secret society for the propagation of democratic ideas; the
army made no attempt to resist; neither villages nor towns rose in
insurrection; and the Council of Regency, which consisted of the Marquis
of Abrantes, the Marquis of Olhão, General Francisco da Cunha e Menezes,
General Francisco Xavier de Noronha, Principal Castro, and Pedro de
Mello Breyner, President of the Treasury, instantly submitted. The
people of Lisbon had been disgusted with the wavering and unpatriotic
policy of the Prince Regent; they complained with reason that he had
wasted time in diplomacy instead of preparing for defence; they
contrasted his yielding to Spain at the Treaty of Badajoz with the
gallant conduct of John I., and the successful wars of John IV.; and
they looked upon his departure for Brazil as a base desertion of his
country. For all these reasons they welcomed the French, and the
democratic leaders hoped that the Emperor Napoleon would annex their
country, and grant it representative institutions. Junot at first acted
with the greatest prudence; he certainly raised two millions of francs
in Lisbon by requisition, and seized all the money in the royal
treasury, but at the same time he gratified the Portuguese people by
refusing to give the Spaniards any of the plunder, and he encouraged
them in the belief that the Emperor would not destroy their
independence. His next step was to disband the whole Portuguese army,
and to quarter French troops in all the more important cities and
fortresses. Not satisfied with this, Junot then raised a powerful
Portuguese force, consisting of two divisions of infantry, two regiments
of çaçadores or light infantry, and three regiments of cavalry, which he
despatched to France under the command of Lieutenant-General Dom Pedro
de Almada, Marquis of Alorna, and Major-General Gomes Freire de Andrade.
This force which was known as the Portuguese Legion, contained all the
most disciplined officers and soldiers of the nation, and did gallant
service under Napoleon throughout the French campaigns in Spain,
Germany, and Russia, and the remnant of it served under his standards at
Waterloo. Thus freed from the presence of the most dangerous element of
resistance, Junot began to show his own disposition. He now made no
effort to conciliate the Portuguese democrats, and laughed at their idea
of a Portuguese constitution; he hoisted the tricolour flag on the
Citadel of St. George; he divided the country into military governments
under his generals; and finally on the 1st of February, 1807, he issued
a proclamation “that the House of Braganza had ceased to reign.”
After issuing this proclamation the French took entire possession of
Portugal; the alcaides were dismissed, and the French generals ruled
with absolute authority as military governors. A new regency was formed,
which included several Frenchmen, notably Junot himself as president,
General Herman, M. Lhuillier, and Viennot de Vaublanc as
Secretary-General; and a new ministry was constituted of friends to the
French alliance, consisting of Pedro de Mello Breyner at the Home
Office, Azevedo at the Treasury, the Count of Sampaio at the War Office,
and Principal Castro at the Ministry of Justice. Junot then began to
intrigue for the throne of Portugal; he knew well that Napoleon had no
intention of carrying out the terms of the treaty of Fontainebleau; and
he did not see why, after his successful campaign, he should not receive
this great reward. He posed as a patron of letters, and was elected
President of the “Academia Real das Sciencias” in the place of the Duke
of Lafoẽs; he changed his attitude towards and made extravagant
promises to the radical party; and in the hope of succeeding the
Braganzas, he reduced Napoleon’s requisition of forty millions of francs
to twenty millions, on his own authority. The chief agent, through whom
he negotiated, was a lawyer, named José de Scabra, who got up a
deputation to visit Napoleon, headed by the Grand Inquisitor, the Bishop
of Leiria, to ask for the nomination of Junot as King of Portugal. These
efforts of Junot’s were, however, of no avail. The tyranny of his
generals, and their treatment of the Portuguese as a conquered people;
the atrocities which the French soldiers committed, and their deliberate
insults to the dearest sentiments of a proud nation, far outweighed the
effect of Junot’s policy. General Thomières, for instance, plundered the
great abbey of Alçobaça, and destroyed the corpses of the early kings of
Portugal; and General Loison trampled on the people, and put down a
little riot at Mafra with most frightful cruelty. There were exceptions
to this behaviour of course. General Travot and General Charlot made
themselves popular by their just administration; but, as a rule, the
conduct of the French generals was rapacious in the extreme. At this
moment, when the Portuguese people were quivering with indignation, came
the news of the rebellion in Spain, and of the victory of Baylen. The
Spanish general, Bellesta, who commanded at Oporto in succession to
General Taranco, seized the French governor, General Quesnel, and handed
him over to a Portuguese junta, and then marched away into Gallicia. It
was on the 18th of June, when the French had held Portugal for about
nine months, that this great event occurred. Antonio José de Castro,
Bishop of Oporto, was declared president of the “junta” of that city.
The example was followed from Braga to Faro; everywhere the French
officers were murdered or expelled, and independent “juntas” were
formed. At this juncture the Portuguese people felt that they could not
resist France by their own strength; and the Bishop of Oporto appealed
to the old ally of Portugal, England, for assistance.
[Illustration: PORTUGUESE PEASANTS.
(_From Kinsey’s “Portugal Illustrated,” 1829._)]