wished for a base on the Continent from which to act against Napoleon by
land, and, in the words of Canning, “the arm of Great Britain became the
lever, and Portugal the fulcrum, to wrench from its basis the power that
had subdued the rest of Europe.” In the previous year, a force under
Colonel Beresford had occupied Madeira, but up to this time, no attempt
had been made to dislodge the French from Portugal itself. On the
receipt of this appeal from Oporto however, a small army, which had been
collected at Cork under the command of Lieutenant-General the Honourable
Sir Arthur Wellesley, for an expedition to South America, was ordered
instead to proceed to Portugal; reinforcements were collected at
Ramsgate and Harwich, and a division under Major-General Brent Spencer
was ordered to sail from Gibraltar to join him. A Lusitanian Legion was
also formed out of the Portuguese who happened to be in England, and
despatched to Portugal under the command of Colonel Sir Robert Wilson
and Colonel Mayne. It was indeed time that help should arrive; all the
best troops and most skilled officers had been sent out of Portugal in
the Portuguese Legion to join the Grand Army of France, and the
undisciplined peasants and apprentices hastily collected by the “juntas”
were easily defeated in many places by the French veterans. Sir Arthur
Wellesley landed at the mouth of the Mondego River, and advanced
southwards upon Lisbon. He first defeated Laborde’s division at Roliça
on the 17th of August, 1808; and, after receiving reinforcements, he
routed Junot himself at Vimeiro on the 21st of August. These victories
were followed by the Convention of Cintra by which Junot agreed to
evacuate Portugal and surrender all the fortresses in his possession, on
condition that his troops and their plunder should be transported safe
to France. This convention, however disappointing from a military point
of view to the English authorities, was eminently satisfactory to the
Portuguese people, who saw themselves delivered from the French, as
speedily as they had been conquered by them.
The former Council of Regency, nominated by the Prince Regent before his
departure, was re-established at Lisbon, and at once began to quarrel
with the “junta” of Oporto, but both bodies perceived how dependent they
were on the English Government, and the Regency sent Domingos Antonio de
Sousa Coutinho to London to ask that an English ambassador with full
powers should be accredited to Lisbon, and that Sir Arthur Wellesley
might be appointed to reorganize their army. In compliance with these
requests the Right Honourable J. C. Villiers was sent as ambassador to
Lisbon, and, as Sir Arthur Wellesley could not be spared, Major-General
Beresford, who had learnt the Portuguese language, when governor of
Madeira, was sent to command and discipline the Portuguese troops.
Meanwhile, Portugal was again exposed to the attacks of the French; when
Sir John Moore advanced to Salamanca, he had left very few English
troops behind, and Napoleon ordered three French armies to invade the
country by different routes. Of these armies only one actually entered
Portugal, that from the north under the command of Marshal Soult.
Parties of the Lusitanian Legion, under Sir Robert Wilson and Baron
Eben, made a spirited resistance, and even the unorganized Portuguese
levies, under General Antonio de Silveira, showed courage, if not
discipline; but their efforts were in vain, and Soult occupied Oporto.
Fortunately for the Portuguese, Soult, like Junot, was led away by the
idea of becoming King of Portugal, and did not advance on Lisbon, while
Lapisse and Victor did not support him by entering the Beira and the
Alemtejo, as they had been ordered to do, and this delay gave time for
Sir Arthur Wellesley to reach the Tagus with a powerful English army. On
the 12th of May, 1809, he drove Soult out of Oporto, and into Gallicia;
and after this success he invaded Spain, and defeated Joseph Bonaparte
and Marshal Victor at the battle of Talavera.
From these successes of the English general, it is necessary to turn to
the condition of the Portuguese regency. After the departure of the
Prince Regent, all the able men of the English party and the trained
administrators had left Portugal for Brazil; the leaders of the radical
party were either in disgrace, or had fled to France, and none were left
to compose the regency save a set of intriguers, whose chief idea was to
get as much money from England as possible, and convey it into their own
pockets. The Portuguese people acted very differently; they were
indignant at the outrageous conduct of the French soldiery, and were
ready to sacrifice their lives for the national cause. This enthusiasm
was reported to the English Government, which determined to take ten
thousand Portuguese soldiers into English pay, and to send out a number
of English regimental officers to discipline and command them. No better
man than Beresford could have been selected as commander-in-chief of the
Portuguese army. He proved himself in after-years, and especially at the
battle of Albuera, to be but a poor general; but as an organizer his
firmness, which almost amounted to severity, made him at once obeyed and
feared. His chief assistants in this work were the English officers who
had been sent to him, and a small body of Portuguese officers whom
patriotism had forced into exile in preference to serving in the French
Portuguese Legion, and at the head of these two classes were his
Quartermaster-General, Major-General Benjamin D’Urban, an Englishman,
and his Adjutant-General, Colonel Manoel de Brito Mousinho, a
Portuguese. So hard did Beresford work during the winter of 1809, while
Lord Wellington, as Sir Arthur Wellesley had been created, was in Spain,
that in the spring of 1810, certain Portuguese regiments were brigaded
with the English, and showed themselves worthy of the honour. They
fought side by side with the English soldiers at the battle of Busaco,
and the behaviour of the 8th Portuguese Infantry is one of the most
disputed points in the history of that battle, every historian of the
war stating that it behaved well, but all differing as to the time it
came into action, and the effect of its bayonet charge.
[Illustration: A FEMALE PEASANT FROM THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF CALDAS DA
RAINHA.
(_From Kinsey’s “Portugal Illustrated,” 1829._)]
While Beresford was doing this good work, and the flower of the
Portuguese youth was rushing to arms in the regular army, or in the
militia reserve, the regency at Lisbon was going from bad to worse. The
Prince Regent at Rio de Janeiro had no control over it, and it was
divided into parties, which quarrelled over the disposition of the
English subsidies as if they were legitimate spoil. There is no need to
study the intrigues of these parties, but it is worth notice, that Dom
Pedro de Sousa Holstein, better known in after-years as the Duke of
Palmella, was despatched to the Spanish junta to claim the Regency of
Spain for Donna Carlotta Joaquina the Queen of Portugal, when Portugal
could not even defend its own territory. Neither Wellington nor
Beresford could work with this factious regency, and the English cabinet
had to insist that the English ambassador at Lisbon, Sir Charles Stuart,
the son of General the Honourable Sir Charles Stuart, should receive a
seat upon the council. His great ability and tact soon made him the
master of his colleagues, and a certain portion of the money, sent by
England to pay the Portuguese troops, did at last find its way to its
proper destination. The Regency, even when thus strengthened, failed to
become popular; it was hotly criticized and abused; and the murmuring
radical party in Lisbon, which hankered after peace with France, was
only suppressed by the deportation of eighteen leading journalists to
the Azores in September, 1810.
It is little wonder that some opposition to the war existed in 1810, for
in that year the most formidable invasion of French troops took place.
This was the famous invasion of Masséna. The Portuguese nation showed
all the valour of a people, fighting for its very existence as a
nation, and when Lord Wellington, on being obliged to retire into the
lines of Torres Vedras, commanded the peasants to abandon their homes
and leave nothing for the French to subsist upon, they obeyed him with
touching fidelity. While Wellington was entrenched within his lines,
Beresford established his headquarters at Lisbon, and continued the work
of reorganization with the help of a fresh contingent of English
regimental officers, which reached him at this time. He proceeded
rapidly, but in regular order, and having organized and disciplined the
Portuguese regiments in the winter of 1809, he made them into
independent Portuguese brigades in the winter of 1810. In all he formed
a powerful Portuguese army of twelve infantry brigades, partly commanded
by English brigadiers, such as Ashworth, Pack, Bradford, and Archibald
Campbell, partly by native officers, such as Le Cor, Fonseca, Palmeirim,
and Bernadim Ribeiros, four cavalry brigades, under Povoa and Barbacena,
Madden and Hawker, and an artillery park of forty-eight guns under
Colonel Alexander Dickson. While Beresford was engaged at Lisbon in
organizing the Portuguese army, the Portuguese militia was doing good
work in the northern provinces, where the chief command was held by
Major-General Manoel Pinto Bacellar. Brigades of militia under such
dashing commanders as Antonio de Silveira, John Miller, Nicholas Trant,
and John Wilson, harassed Masséna’s lines of communication with Spain;
and while he was before the lines of Torres Vedras and at Santarem, he
had to keep three divisions employed in keeping open his line of retreat
and escorting his convoys. In the field, the Portuguese militia was
always defeated, but Masséna could never feel safe from their attacks,
and to mention but one brilliant exploit, Trant’s capture of Coimbra
seriously inconvenienced him at a critical moment.
Finally in the March of 1811, Masséna had to retire, and the Portuguese
then reaped their reward in having their frontiers freed from the
invader for the rest of the Peninsular War. Englishmen of modern times
are too apt to look upon the victories of the Peninsular War, as the
results of English valour alone. Wellington knew better; he knew what he
owed to the Portuguese troops, and recognized their services in his
despatches; and contemporaries always spoke of the victorious soldiers,
as the allied, or the Anglo-Portuguese army. Throughout the great
campaigns of 1812, 1813, and 1814, the Portuguese troops, shared the
labours and the glories of Wellington’s army; and to mention but a
single exploit, the attacks of Pack’s and Bradford’s Portuguese brigades
on the Arapiles in the battle of Salamanca roused the warm admiration of
the English soldiers and officers though they were not crowned with
success. During the winter of 1812, while the allied army was in winter
quarters after the retreat from Burgos, Beresford put the finishing
touch to his work by the formation of independent Portuguese divisions.
The çaçadores or light infantry were however too valuable to be
separated from the English light infantry regiments, and continued to
form part of the famous Light Division until the close of the war. The
Portuguese divisions were like the brigades divided between English and
Portuguese generals, among whom the most conspicuous were Sir John
Hamilton, and Sir Archibald Campbell, the future conqueror of Burma,
Carlos Frederic Le Cor and Agostino Luis da Fonseca. During the
movements which followed the victory of Vittoria, the Portuguese showed
their courage and discipline, and not only Wellington, but all the
historians of the war, draw attention to their good conduct alike in the
field and in quarters, as compared with the licentiousness and want of
discipline of the Spanish armies. Meanwhile, matters went on well at
home; the Regency, under the control of Sir Charles Stuart, was unable
to embezzle the English subsidies; he took care that the troops were
well paid, clothed, and fed; the Portuguese people rejoiced at the
achievements of their soldiers against France, and profited by the large
influx of English money into Portugal. When the war was over and the
news of the abdication of Napoleon, and of the battle of Toulouse
arrived, the returning troops were enthusiastically received, and all
promised brightly for the future. The English Government were not
unmindful of the services rendered by the Portuguese, and when
Wellington’s generals were raised to the peerage, Marshal Beresford, the
organizer of the Portuguese army, was created Lord Beresford, and Sir
Charles Stuart, the ambassador at Lisbon, Lord Stuart de Rothesay.
But these rejoicings were soon followed by bitter lamentations, for the
English plenipotentiaries at the Congress of Vienna headed by Lord
Castlereagh, basely deserted their gallant allies. The Portuguese
envoys at this famous meeting for the re-settlement of Europe were Pedro
de Sousa Holstein, Count of Palmella, afterwards Duke of Palmella,
Antonio de Saldanha da Gama, afterwards Count of Porto Santo, and
Jeronymo Lobo da Silveira, afterwards Count of Oriolla. These
diplomatists urged that Spain should be forced to restore Olivença,
which Portugal had been obliged to cede at the Treaty of Badajoz in
1801, a claim which was perfectly fair and just; but Talleyrand opposed
this act of justice, and Castlereagh unjustifiably abandoned the
faithful ally of England, an act at once ungrateful and impolitic. A
feeling that England was ungrateful was the prevailing idea among the
Portuguese, when the news arrived from Rio de Janeiro that the mad Queen
Maria Francisca had died on March 20, 1816, and that the Prince Regent
had been proclaimed king as John VI.
[Illustration: text decoration]
[Illustration: text decoration]
XVIII.
MODERN PORTUGAL.
CIVIL WARS AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT.
The history of Portugal, after the conclusion of the Peninsular War,
affords a melancholy example of the evil effects of all prolonged wars.
The people, without great monarchs or great ministers, was divided into
many parties, which quarrelled and fought; numerous civil wars
distressed the country; commerce and agriculture were neglected; local
rivalry and class jealousy were allowed to grow to serious proportions;
the government of the country and the administration of justice went
from bad to worse; and, as usual, misery and poverty followed in the
train of political discontent. It is neither interesting nor instructive
to study the details of the civil wars of the first half of the
nineteenth century. Throughout the whole story of Portugal, the most
prominent feature is the singular tenacity with which the little country
maintained its independence and its individuality, and it is painful to
observe that this patriotic feeling almost entirely disappeared for a
time. It was during this period that Portugal fell to the rank of a
third-rate state, for it now ceased to be an important factor in
European politics, either from its wealth and its colonies, or as the
trusted ally of England. This was largely due to a change in the
attitude of England, where the old historical friendship for Portugal,
which had been maintained since the Middle Ages and had been of
advantage to both parties, was abandoned, to the lasting regret of every
one who values the existence of sentiment and of historical continuity
in politics. Nevertheless, in spite of its loss of importance, some
account must be given of Portugal during this distressing epoch; for, if
it is interesting to study the history of a nation in prosperity, it is
also instructive to see how it fell to its lowest depths.
John VI. had greatly enjoyed the peace and comfort of his residence in
Brazil as Prince Regent, and he had become more attached to Brazil than
to Portugal, when he was proclaimed King of Portugal, Brazil, and the
Algarves in 1816. The people of the mother country resented this
heartily; they looked upon him as a deserter; and feared that he would
favour the interests of the colony unduly. They were also alarmed at the
growing spirit of independence in Brazil; they knew that the chief
wealth of Portugal during the eighteenth century had been derived from
its great colony, and they were well aware that any separation would be
most prejudicial to their prosperity. The affection of the new king for
Brazil appeared in the very first year of his reign, for instead of
insisting on the restitution of Olivença, he preferred to attack the
former possessions of Spain in South America, and ordered to Brazil a
corps of 4,500 veterans of the Peninsular War under the command of
Lieutenant-General Le Cor. A pretext for war was found in the republican
movement of Artigas; the local militia could make no stand against the
Portuguese soldiers; on the 20th of January, 1817, Le Cor took Monte
Video, and he soon occupied all the country up to the left bank of the
River Plate. The victorious general was created Baron of Laguna, and
continued to occupy the Banda Oriental until 1825, when the inhabitants
rose in rebellion, and after much warfare they founded the Republic of
Uruguay, and became independent alike of Brazil and the Argentine
Republic.
John VI. gave colour to the accusation of the Portuguese that he
intended to desert them for the Brazilians, and invert the position of
the two nations, by his obstinate refusal to leave Rio de Janeiro. The
English Cabinet persistently urged him to return to Europe, but he
remained deaf to all remonstrances, and paid little or no attention to
the state of affairs in Portugal. He met with no help, but only with
opposition from his queen, Donna Carlotta Joaquina, who was always
intriguing against him, and who had, as early as 1805, promised a
liberal constitution to certain Portuguese radical leaders, in order to
build up a position distinct from her husband. Nor had she intrigued
only in Portugal, for in 1812 it was discovered that she had formed a
scheme to become independent Queen of Brazil. All these plots were
intended for the eventual advantage of her younger son, Dom Miguel, an
arrogant youth, who was commonly believed to be illegitimate. Nor was
John VI. more happy in his relations with his elder son, Dom Pedro, who
was a fanatical admirer of the system of parliamentary government. Dom
Pedro was further Grand Master of the Freemasons of Brazil, and an open
supporter of the Brazilian party, which hoped for a liberal constitution
and complete separation from Portugal. This prince was a man of real
ability, high character, and enlightened opinions, and his importance in
the family was increased by his marriage, through the negotiations of
Dom Pedro de Menezes Coutinho, Marquis of Marialva, and Prince
Metternich, with the Archduchess Maria Josepha, daughter of the Emperor
Francis I. of Austria.
In Portugal, the government of the Regency had grown intensely
unpopular, for Lord Stuart de Rothesay and Marshal Beresford ruled most
despotically. The people which had endured the authority of the English
during the terrible war for existence, and the very soldiers who had
served so gallantly under English officers on the field of battle, soon
grew weary of foreign rule in time of peace, and raised the cry of
“Portugal for the Portuguese.” The ministers, who had reluctantly paid
the large sums needed for the expenses of the army, even when aided by
subsidies from England, now that those subsidies were withdrawn,
insisted on great reductions, and practically paid nothing at all.
Democratic ideas spread swiftly; the people claimed a share in the
government, and expressed aloud their hatred for the king, the Regency,
and the English, and a spirit of discontent arose in every part of the
kingdom. The first outbreak took place in 1818, when General Gomes
Freire de Andrade, who had commanded the Portuguese Legion in the
Russian and other campaigns in Napoleon’s army, and who was an ardent
lover of France, planned a “pronunciamento,” but the plot was discovered
and suppressed with stringent severity by the Regency, which ordered the
execution of the general and of ten of his partisans. This rigorous
punishment only enraged the radical party, and when Beresford went to
Brazil in 1820 in order to get money from the king to pay the arrears
due to the army, advantage was taken of his absence by the people of
Oporto to raise the standard of revolt under the leadership of Colonel
Antonio de Silveira, Brito da Fonseca, and other officers belonging to
the garrison. The Regency in Lisbon, deprived of the presence of
Beresford, gave way before a similar rising in the capital, headed by
the Counts of Resende, Penafiel, and Sampaio, and the revolutionary
juntas formed in the two great cities agreed to act in harmony. The
English officers were driven from the country; Beresford was not allowed
to land when he returned from Rio de Janeiro; a fresh regency was
proclaimed; and a constituent assembly was summoned to draw up a
constitution for Portugal.
This assembly, of which the majority consisted of men of the most
democratic opinions, at once abolished all relics of feudalism, and, to
the disgust of the ecclesiastics, suppressed the Inquisition in
Portugal, in spite of its studied moderation in recent years, on account
of its former misdeeds. The deputies then proceeded to draw up a most
impracticable constitution for the future government of the country,
which showed that they had studied the glowing speeches of the orators
of the French Revolution, and had not profited by the knowledge of their
mistakes. By this constitution, which was known in later history as the
“Constitution of 1822,” protection of person and property was
guaranteed; and liberty of the press, equality before the law, the
admissibility of all citizens to all offices, the abolition of
privileges and the sovereignty of the nation were proclaimed. One freely
elected chamber was to be summoned yearly to make laws and superintend
the government of the country, and the king was granted only a
suspensive veto over its measures. On hearing of this revolution,
Prussia, Austria, and Russia withdrew their ambassadors from Lisbon, and
England insisted that John VI. should at once proceed to Portugal. The
king accordingly left Rio de Janeiro and returned to Lisbon, where he
solemnly swore to observe the new constitution, and to rule for the
future as a constitutional monarch. The queen and Dom Miguel were not so
complaisant; they refused to recognize the constitution, and were at
once forced to leave Lisbon. On the departure of John VI., Brazil
declared itself independent, and Dom Pedro, who was elected emperor,
granted that country a liberal parliamentary constitution. The
Portuguese troops and royal vessels made a slight attempt to preserve
the royal authority in South America, but the latter were speedily
defeated by Lord Cochrane, who entered the Brazilian service, and the
separation of the great colony from its mother-country became an
acknowledged fact.