Chapter I
DUHESME’S OPERATIONS: FIRST SIEGE OF GERONA (JUNE-JULY, 1808)
There is still one corner of the Iberian Peninsula whose history, during the eventful summer months of 1808, we have not yet chronicled. The rugged and warlike province of Catalonia had already begun that heroic struggle against its French garrison which was to endure throughout the whole of the war. Far more than any other section of the Spanish nation do the Catalans deserve credit for their unswerving patriotism. Nowhere else was the war maintained with such resolution. When the struggle commenced the French were already masters by treachery of the chief fortresses of the land: the force of Spanish regular troops which lay within its borders was insignificant: there was no recognized leader, no general of repute, to head the rising of the province. Yet the attack on the invaders was delivered with a fierceness and a persistent energy that was paralleled in no other quarter of the Peninsula. For six years marshal after marshal ravaged the Catalan valleys, sacked the towns, scattered the provincial levies. But not for one moment did the resistance slacken; the invaders could never control a foot of ground beyond the narrow space that was swept by the cannon of their strongholds. The spirit of the race was as unbroken in 1813 as in 1808, and their untiring bands still held out in the hills, ready to strike at the enemy when the least chance was offered. Other provinces had equal or greater advantages than Catalonia for protracted resistance: Biscay, the Asturias, and Galicia were as rugged, Andalusia far more populous, Valencia more fertile and wealthy. But in none of these was the struggle carried on with such a combination of energy and persistence as in the Catalan hills. Perhaps the greatest testimony that can be quoted in behalf of the people of that devoted province is that Napier, bitter critic as he was of all things Spanish, is forced to say a good word for it. ‘The Catalans,’ he writes, ‘were vain and superstitious; but their courage was higher, their patriotism purer, and their efforts more sustained than those of the rest. The somatenes were bold and active in battle, the population of the towns firm, and the juntas apparently disinterested[290].’ No one but a careful student of Napier will realize what a handsome testimonial is contained in the somewhat grudging language of this paragraph. What the real credit due to the Catalans was, it will now be our duty to display.
[290] Napier, History of the Peninsular War, i. 90.
It will be remembered that in the month of February the French general Duhesme had obtained possession of the citadel and forts of Barcelona by a particularly impudent and shameless stratagem[291]. Since that time he had been lying in the city that he had seized, with his whole force concentrated under his hand. Of the 7,000 French and 5,000 Italian troops which composed his corps, all were with him save a single battalion of detachments which had been left behind to garrison Figueras, the fortress close to the French frontier, which commands the most important of the three roads by which the principality of Catalonia can be entered.
[291] See pp. 36, 37 of this book.
Duhesme believed himself to be entirely secure, for of Spanish regular troops there were barely 6,000 in all scattered through the province[292], and a third of these were Swiss mercenaries, who, according to the orders of Bonaparte, were to be taken at once into the French service. That there was any serious danger to be feared from the miqueletes of the mountains never entered into the heads of the Emperor or his lieutenant. Nor does it seem to have occurred to them that any insurrection which broke out in Catalonia might be immediately supported from the Balearic Isles, where a heavy garrison was always kept, in order to guard against any descent of the British to recover their old stronghold of Port Mahon[293]. If Napoleon had realized in May that the Spanish rising was about to sweep over the whole Peninsula, he would not have dared to leave Duhesme with such a small force. But persisting in his original blunder of believing that the troubles which had broken out were merely local and sporadic, he was about to order Duhesme to make large detachments from a corps that was already dangerously weak.
[292] They were the following:--
Regiment of Estremadura 840 strong at Tarrega (near Lerida). Regiment of Ultonia 421 ” Gerona. Two battalions of Wimpfen’s Swiss Regiment 2,149 ” Tarragona. Two battalions of Spanish and Walloon Guards 1,700 ” Barcelona. Cavalry Regiment of Borbon 658 ” ” Artillery 300 ” in various forts on coast. ------ 6,068
[293] The Spanish garrisons in the Balearic Isles consisted of the following troops:--
Regiment of Granada (three batts.) 1,183 at Port Mahon. Regiment of Soria (three batts.) 1,381 ” Regiment of Borbon (three batts.) 1,570 at Palma. Swiss Regiment of Beschard (two batts.) 2,121 ” Light Infantry of Barcelona, No. 2 1,341 at Port Mahon. ” ” Aragon, No. 2. 1,267 at Palma. Militia Battalion of Majorca 604 ” 6th Hussars (Husares Españoles) 680 ” Artillery 500 ” and Port Mahon. ------ 10,647
The geography of Catalonia, as we have had occasion to relate in an earlier chapter, is rather complicated. Not only is the principality cut off by its mountains from the rest of Spain--it faces towards the sea, while its neighbour Aragon faces towards the Ebro--but it is divided by its numerous cross-ranges into a number of isolated valleys, between which communication is very difficult. Its coast-plain along the Mediterranean is generally narrow, and often cut across by spurs which run down from the mountains of the inland till they strike the sea. Except on the eastern side of the principality, where it touches Aragon in the direction of Lerida, there is no broad expanse of level ground within its borders: much the greater part of its surface is upland and mountain.
Catalonia may be divided into four regions: the first is the district at the foot of the Eastern Pyrenees, drained by the Fluvia and the Ter. This narrow corner is called the Ampurdam; it contains all the frontier-fortresses which protect the province on the side of France. Rosas commands the pass along the sea-shore, Figueras the main road from Perpignan, which runs some twenty miles further inland. A little further south both these roads meet, and are blocked by the strong city of Gerona, the capital of all this region and its most important strategical point. South of Gerona a cross-range divides the Ampurdam from the coast-plain of Central Catalonia; the defile through this range is covered by the small fortified town of Hostalrich, but there is an alternative route from Gerona to Barcelona along the coast by Blanes and Arens de Mar.
The river-basin of Central Catalonia is that of the Llobregat, near whose estuary Barcelona stands. Its lower course lies through the level ground along the coast, but its upper waters and those of its tributaries drain a series of highland valleys, difficult of access and divided from each other by considerable chains of hills. All these valleys unite at the foot of the crag of Montserrat, which, crowned by its monastery, overlooks the plain, and stands sentinel over the approach to the upland. In the mountains behind Montserrat was the main stronghold of the Catalan insurrection, whose rallying-places were the high-lying towns of Manresa, Cardona, Berga, and Solsona. Only three practicable roads enter the valleys of the Upper Llobregat, one communicates by the line of Manresa and Vich with the Ampurdam; a second goes from Manresa via Cervera to Lerida, and ultimately to the plains of Aragon; the third is the high-road from Barcelona to Manresa, the main line of approach from the shore to the upland. But there is another route of high importance in this section of Catalonia, that which, starting from Barcelona, avoids the upper valleys, strikes inland by Igualada, crosses the main watershed between the coast and the Ebro valley below Cervera, and at that place joins the other road from Manresa and the Upper Llobregat, and continues on its way to Lerida and the plains of Aragon. This, passing the mountains at the point of least resistance, forms the great trunk-road from Barcelona to Madrid.
The third region of the principality is the coastland of Tarragona, a district cut off from the coastland of Barcelona by a well-marked cross-ridge, which runs down from the mountains to the sea, and reaches the latter near the mouth of the Llobregat. The communication between the two maritime districts is by two roads, one passing the cross-ridge by the defile of Ordal, the other hugging the beach and finding its way between the hills and the water’s edge by Villanueva de Sitjas. The coastland of Tarragona is not drained by a single river of considerable volume, like the Llobregat, but by a number of small streams such as the Francoli and the Gaya, running parallel to each other and at right angles to the coast. Each is separated from the next by a line of hills of moderate height. The southern limit of this region is the Ebro, whose lower course is protected by the strong fortress of Tortosa. Its main line of internal communication is the great coast-route from Barcelona to Tarragona, and from Tarragona to the mouth of the Ebro. Its touch with Aragon and Central Spain is maintained by a good road from Tarragona by Montblanch to Lerida.
The fourth and last region of Catalonia is the inland, which looks not towards the Mediterranean but to the Ebro and Aragon. It is drained by the Segre, an important stream, which after being joined by its tributaries, the Noguera and the Pallaresa, falls into the Ebro not far to the south of Lerida. The tracts around that town are flat and fertile, part of the main valley of the Ebro. But the head-waters of the Segre and its affluents flow through narrow and difficult mountain valleys, starting in the highest and wildest region of the Pyrenees. They are very inaccessible, and served by no roads suitable for the use of an army. Hence, like the upper valley of the Llobregat, they served as places of refuge for the Catalan insurgents when Lerida and the flat country had been lost. The only place of importance in these highlands is the remote town of Seu d’ Urgel[294], a mediaeval fortress near the sources of the Segre, approached by mule-paths only, and quite lost in the hills.
[294] Urgel is more accessible from France than from Spain. The easiest path to it is that which, starting from Mont-Louis, crosses the Spanish frontier at Puycerda, and follows the head-water of the Segre to the foot of the hill on which the Seu stands.
Catalonia, then, is pre-eminently a mountain land, and one presenting special difficulties to an invader, because it has no central system of roads or valleys, but is divided into so many heterogeneous parts. Though not fertile, it was yet rich, and fairly well peopled when compared with other regions of Spain[295]. Its wealth came not from agriculture but from commerce and manufactures. Barcelona, a city of 180,000 souls, was the greatest Mediterranean port of Spain: on each side of it, along the coast, are dozens of large fishing-villages and small harbour-towns, drawing their living from the sea. Of the places which lay farther back from the water there were many which made an ample profit from their manufactures, for Catalonia was, and still remains, the workshop of Spain. It is the only province of the kingdom where the inhabitants have developed industries on a large scale: its textile products were especially successful, and supplied the whole Peninsula.
[295] The population of the Principality in 1803 was 858,000 souls.
More than any other part of Spain, Catalonia had suffered from the war with England and the Continental System. The closure of its ports had told cruelly upon its merchants and manufacturers, who were fully aware that their sufferings were the logical consequence of the French alliance. They had, moreover, a historic grudge against France: after encouraging them to revolt in the seventeenth century, the Bourbons had then abandoned them to the mercies of the King of the Castilians. In the great war of the Spanish Succession, Catalonia had taken sides against France and Don Philip, and had proclaimed Charles of Austria its king--not because it loved him, but because it hated the French claimant. Even after the Peace of Utrecht the Catalans had refused to lay down their arms, and had made a last desperate struggle for provincial independence. It was in these wars that their miqueletes[296] had first made their name famous by their stubborn fighting. These bands were a levy en masse of the population of military age, armed and paid by their parishes, not by the central government, which could be called out whenever the principality was threatened with invasion. From their liability to turn out whenever the alarm-bell (somaten) was rung, they were also known as somatenes. The system of the Quinta and the militia ballot, which prevailed in the provinces under the crown of Castile, had never been applied to the Catalans, who gloried in the survival of their ancient military customs. The somatenes had been called out in the French war of 1793-5, and had done good service in it, distinguishing themselves far more than the troops of the line which fought on the frontier of the Eastern Pyrenees. The memories of that struggle were still fresh among them, and many of the leaders who had won a name in it were still fit for service. In Catalonia then, more than in any other corner of Spain, there were all the materials at hand for a vigorous popular insurrection, even though the body of regular troops in the principality was insignificant. The Catalans rose to defend their provincial independence, and to recover their capital, which had been seized so shamelessly by the trickery of Duhesme. They did not concern themselves much with what was going on in Aragon and Valencia, or even in Madrid. Their fight with the invader forms an episode complete in itself, a sort of underplot in the great drama of the Peninsular War, which only touches the main struggle at infrequent intervals. It was not affected by the campaigns of Castile, still less had it any noticeable influence on them. It would be equally possible to write the history of the war in Catalonia as a separate treatise, or to compile a general history of the war in which Catalonia was barely mentioned.
[296] So called from Miquelot de Prats, the Catalan condottiere who served under Caesar Borgia. From him the light infantry, once called almogavares, got the name of miqueletes.
When the echoes of the cannon of the second of May went rolling round Spain, they stirred up Catalonia no less than the other provinces which lie at a distance from the capital. The phenomena which appeared in the South and the West were repeated here, in much the same sequence, and at much the same dates, as elsewhere. But the rising of the Catalans was greatly handicapped by the fact that their populous and wealthy capital was occupied by 12,000 French troops. Barcelona could not set the example to the smaller places, and for some time the outburst was spasmodic and local. The chief focus of rebellion was Lerida, where an insurrectionary Junta was formed on May 29. At Tortosa the populace rose a few days later, and murdered the military governor, Santiago de Guzman, because he had been slow and reluctant to place himself at their head. On June 2 Manresa, in the upper valley of the Llobregat, followed their example, and from it the flame of insurrection spread all over the central upland. In Barcelona itself there were secret meetings, and suspicious gatherings in the streets, on which Duhesme had to keep a watchful eye. But the main preoccupation of the French general was that there were still several thousand Spanish troops in the town, who might easily lead the populace in an émeute. He had got rid of one regiment, that of Estremadura, in May: he gave it orders to march to Lerida, where the magistrates and people refused to receive it within their walls, dreading that it might not be ready to join in their projected rising. This was a vain fear, for the corps readily took its part in the insurrection, and marched to join Palafox at Saragossa. But there still remained in Barcelona a battalion each of the Spanish and the Walloon Guards, and the cavalry regiment of Borbon, some 2,500 men in all. To Duhesme’s intense satisfaction, these troops, instead of keeping together and attacking the French garrison when the news of the revolt reached them, began to desert in small parties. Far from attempting to compel them to stay by their colours, Duhesme winked at their evasion, and took no notice of their proceedings, even when a whole squadron of the Borbon Regiment rode off with trumpets sounding and its officers at its head. Within a few days the greater part of the Spanish troops had vanished, and when Duhesme was directed by his master to disarm them, there were very few left for him to deal with. These scattered remnants of the Guard Regiments drifted in small bands all over Catalonia, some were found at Gerona, others at Tarragona, others at Rosas. Nearly 400 went to Aragon and fought under Palafox at Epila: another considerable body joined the Valencian insurgents[297]. But these two strong veteran battalions never were united again, or made to serve as a nucleus for the Catalan levies[298].
[297] There were 400 Spanish Guards at the fight on the Cabrillas, who must have come from the battalion at Barcelona.
[298] I cannot make out the movements of the cavalry regiment of Borbon; it was certainly at Barcelona, 600 strong, in May. But in July it had got down to Andalusia, and was marching with a strength of 401 in the army of Castaños.
Saved from the peril of a rising of the Spanish regiments in Barcelona, Duhesme had still the insurrection of the province on his hands. But he was not left free to deal with it according to his own inspirations. By the last dispatch from Napoleon which reached him before the communications with Madrid and Bayonne were cut, a plan of campaign was dictated to him. The Emperor ordered him to chastise the insurgents of Lerida and Manresa, without ceasing to keep a strong grip on Barcelona, and on the line of touch with France through Figueras. But, as if this was not enough to occupy his small army of 12,000 or 13,000 men, he was to provide two strong detachments, one of which was to co-operate with Moncey in Valencia, and the other with Lefebvre-Desnouettes in Aragon. A glance at the Emperor’s instructions is enough to show how entirely he had misconceived the situation, and how thoroughly he had failed to realize that all Spain was up in arms. The first detachment, 4,000 strong, was to march on Lerida, and to enter Aragon along the line of the Ebro. It was then to move on Saragossa to join Lefebvre. The second detachment, also 4,000 strong, was to move on Valencia via Tortosa, join Marshal Moncey, and finally occupy the great naval arsenal of Cartagena. With the 5,000 men that remained Duhesme was to hold down Barcelona and Central Catalonia, while keeping open the line of communications with Figueras and Perpignan.
Either Duhesme was as blind to the real state of affairs as his master, or he considered that unquestioning obedience was his first duty. He told off the two columns as directed, only cutting down their strength a little, so as not wholly to ungarnish Barcelona. For the Valencian expedition he told off General Chabran, with the best brigade in his army, three veteran French battalions of the 7th and 16th of the line[299]. With this force he sent his single brigade of French cavalry, two regiments under General Bessières (the brother of the Duke of Istria). The whole amounted to 2,500 foot and 600 horse. For the attack on Lerida, he had to send out troops of more doubtful value--all foreigners, for there were no more French to be spared. General Schwartz was given one Swiss, two Neapolitan, and one Italian battalion[300], with no more than a single squadron of cavalry, for his march was to lie over a very mountainous country. His whole force was 3,200 strong. To the general directions given by Napoleon, Duhesme added some supplementary orders of his own. Chabran was to pass by Tarragona, leave a battalion in its citadel, and take as a compensation the two battalions of Wimpfen’s Swiss Regiment, which was to be incorporated in the French army. It was expected that he would get into touch with Marshal Moncey when he should reach Castellon de la Plana. Schwartz, on the other hand, was told to march by the mountain road leading to Manresa, in order to punish the inhabitants of that town for their rebellion. He was to fine them 750,000 francs, and to destroy a powder-mill which they possessed. He was then to march on Lerida, from which he was to evict the insurrectionary Junta: the city was to pay a heavy war-contribution, and to receive a garrison of 500 men. With the rest of his brigade Schwartz was to join the French forces before Saragossa, not later than June 19.
[299] This force was Goulas’s Brigade of Chabran’s Division, viz.:--
7th of the Line (1st and 2nd batts.) 1,785 16th ” (3rd batt.) 789 ----- 2,574
and Bessières’ Cavalry: 3rd Provisional Cuirassiers (minus one squadron) 205 3rd Provisional Chasseurs 416 ---- 621 ----- 3,195 with eight guns.
[300] Schwartz’s force was:--
2nd Swiss (3rd batt.) 580 1st Neapolitans (1st and 2nd batts.) 1,944 1st Italian Velites (1st batt.) 519 ----- 3,043 One squadron of the 3rd Provisional Cuirassiers 204 ----- 3,247 with four guns.
[That the detached squadron were cuirassiers is proved by Arteche, ii. 86. The French authorities do not give the regiment.]
Foy makes the odd mistake of saying ‘trois bataillons du deuxième Suisse,’ instead of ‘le troisième bataillon du deuxième Suisse.’ There was only one battalion of this regiment with Duhesme.
Schwartz started from Barcelona on June 4: a tempest forced him to wait for a day at Martorel, in the coast-plain, but on the sixth he reached the pass of Bruch, at whose foot the roads from Igualada and from Manresa join. Here he met with opposition: the news of his approach had spread all up the valley of the Llobregat, and the somatenes of the upland towns were hurrying forward to hold the defile by which the high-road from Barcelona climbs into the upper country. At the moment when the invaders, marching in the most careless fashion, were making their way up the hill, only the levy of Manresa was in position. They were a mere handful, 300 or 400 at most, and many were destitute of muskets. But from the cover of a pine-wood they boldly opened fire upon the head of Schwartz’s column. Surprised to find himself attacked, the French general deployed a battalion and drove the somatenes out of their position: they retired in great disorder up the hill towards Manresa. Schwartz followed them with caution, under the idea that they must be the vanguard of a larger force, and that there were probably regular troops in support, further along the defile. In this he was wrong, but the retreating Manresans received reinforcements a few miles behind the place of the first skirmish. They were joined by the levies of San Pedor and other villages of the Upper Llobregat, marching forward to the sound of the single drum that was to be found in the upland. The peasants ensconced themselves in the rocks and bushes on either side of the road, and again offered battle. Schwartz took their opposition much too seriously, extended a long front of tirailleurs against them, but did not push his attack home. Soon other bands of somatenes from the direction of Igualada began to gather round his left flank, and it seemed to him that he would soon be surrounded and cut off from his line of communications with Barcelona. His regiments were raw and not of the best quality: the Neapolitans who composed more than half his force passed, and with reason, as the worst troops in Europe. He himself was a cavalry officer who had never held independent command before, and was wholly unversed in mountain warfare. Reflecting that the afternoon was far spent, that he was still twelve miles from Manresa, and that the whole country-side was on the move against him, he resolved to abandon his expedition. Instead of hurling his four battalions upon the somatenes, who must have been scattered to the winds if attacked by such superior numbers, he drew back, formed his men in a great square, with the cavalry and guns in the middle, and began a retreat across the more open parts of the defile. The Spaniards followed, pressing in the screen of tirailleurs by which the square was covered, and taking easy shots into the solid mass behind them. After six miles of marching under fire, Schwartz’s Swiss and Italians were growing somewhat demoralized, for nothing could be more harassing to raw and unwilling troops than such a retreat. At last they found their way blocked by the village of Esparraguera, where the inhabitants barricaded the streets and opened a hot fire upon the front face of the square. Seeing his men hesitate and break their ranks, Schwartz hastily bade them scatter right and left and pass round the village without attempting to storm it. This device succeeded, but when the two halves of the column reunited beyond Esparraguera, they were in such disorder that there was no means of stopping them. The whole streamed into Martorel in a confused mass at nightfall, after a retreat whose incidents remind the military reader, in every detail, of the rout of the British troops in the march to Lexington, on the first day of the old American War of 1775.
When he reached the plains Schwartz was able to retire unharmed to Barcelona, having saved three of his four guns[301] and lost no very large proportion of his men. But he had suffered the disgrace of being worsted by inferior numbers of undisciplined peasantry, and brought his troops back in a state of demoralization, which was very discouraging to the rest of the garrison of the Catalonian capital. Duhesme, instead of taking him to task, fully approved of his retreat, on the ground that if he had pushed on for Manresa and Lerida he would probably have lost his whole brigade. Realizing at last the true strength of the insurrection, and learning that the somaten was sounding in every village, and that the peasantry were flocking together in thousands, Duhesme determined to concentrate his whole force, and sent orders to Chabran to abandon his Valencian expedition and return at once to Barcelona. He was probably quite right in his resolve, though Chabran’s retreat was the determining fact that ruined Moncey’s campaign in the province south of the Ebro. The Emperor had sketched out the whole plan of operations on false premises, and when the new military situation had developed itself, it would have been absurd for his lieutenants to carry out his original orders in blind and servile obedience.
[301] One gun was lost after leaving Esparraguera by the fall of a rickety bridge over the Abrera (Arteche, ii. 93, 94). Foy and other French narrators do not mention this loss.
Chabran’s column had reached Tarragona when it received Duhesme’s letters of recall. It had started on June 4, and found the coastland still quiet, the insurrection not having yet spread downwards from the hills. On arriving at Tarragona Chabran took possession of the citadel, and issued orders to the two battalions of Wimpfen’s Swiss Regiment, which formed the garrison of the place, to prepare to march with him against Valencia. The Swiss officers showed no alacrity in falling in with this plan. They were not animated by the patriotic fury which had carried away the rest of the Spanish regular troops into the insurgent camp. On the other hand they felt no enthusiasm at the idea of joining the French in an attack on their late employers. They were deferring obedience to the orders of the French general on various futile pleas, when the news of Schwartz’s defeat at Bruch reached Tarragona. Directed to return in haste and to rejoin Duhesme, General Chabran marched off on June 9, leaving Wimpfen’s mercenaries behind: they would not follow him, and declared in favour of the insurgent Junta at Lerida the moment that his back was turned. The retreating French column had to brush aside several considerable bands of somatenes, which tried to arrest its progress, for the coastland had taken arms after the combat of Bruch, and its levies hoped to treat Chabran as their compatriots of the upland had treated Schwartz. But the three veteran French battalions were of tougher material than the Neapolitans and Italians who had been routed on the sixth, and successfully cut their way back to Barcelona. They were aided by the unwisdom of the insurgents, who, instead of trying to defend the difficult defile of Ordal, came down into the plain. When they attacked Chabran at Vendrell and Arbos, they were charged by his cavalry and scattered to the winds with heavy loss. The French, when the actions were over, sacked with every circumstance of brutality all the villages which lay along their path[302]. On June 11 they got into touch with Duhesme’s outposts, and on the twelfth re-entered Barcelona.
[302] For details see Arteche, ii. 98, 99, and Foy, iv. 150, who adds that Arbos ‘fut pillé et réduit en cendres, conformément aux usages de la guerre’(!)
The whole of the ‘Army of the Eastern Pyrenees’ was now reunited under its commander’s hand, and Duhesme thought himself strong enough to punish the peasantry of the Upper Llobregat for their victory at Bruch. On the fourteenth Chabran, with his own brigade and the Swiss and Italians of Schwartz, marched from Martorel to assault once more the pass which the uplanders had defended so well eight days before. But the woods and rocks of Bruch were now manned by many thousands of somatenes: all Central Catalonia had sent its levies thither, and they were supported by 400 regulars from Lerida and four pieces of artillery. After feeling the position, and directing against it at least one serious attack, Chabran drew back and refused to press on the action--apparently influenced by the manifest reluctance of Schwartz’s troops to advance, no less than by the strength of the ground. After losing nearly 400 men he retired to the plain and marched back to Barcelona [June 15].
Duhesme had a more pressing business in hand than the chastisement of the mountaineers of the Upper Llobregat. He had now learnt, by the fact that couriers from France had ceased to arrive, that his communications with Figueras and Upper Catalonia had been cut, and it was absolutely necessary that they should be reopened. This was to prove a harder task than he imagined: the somatenes were now up in every valley as far as the French frontier; they had driven into the citadel of Figueras the weak battalion of detachments that had been left to hold that town, and some of the bolder spirits were feeling their way through the Pyrenean recesses to commence raids on Roussillon. Such alarm was felt at Perpignan that the general commanding the district had begun to call out the national guards, for he had no regulars at his disposal save a few hundred men of details and detachments, who were waiting to go forward to join their regiments in Duhesme’s corps. But all this was unknown at Barcelona, and it was with very little conception of the difficulties before him that Duhesme resolved to march on Gerona and reopen the main road to France. He told off for this service one half of the infantry battalions which composed his army--the Italian division of Lecchi, consisting of the brigades of Schwartz and of Milosewitz, the latter of which had hitherto remained in garrison at Barcelona, and had not taken part in the futile attacks on the defile of Bruch. He also took with him nearly the whole of his cavalry, four French and three Italian squadrons of cuirassiers and chasseurs, and a battery of eight guns. This gave him a formidable force of 5,900 men[303], about half of the total strength of his corps when the losses suffered at Bruch and elsewhere are deducted.
[303] Brigade of Milosewitz: 2nd Italian Line (2nd batt.) 740 4th ” (3rd batt.) 587 5th ” (2nd batt.) 806 ---- 2,133
Brigade of Schwartz: 1st Neapolitans (1st and 2nd batts.) 1,944 1st Italian Velites (1st batt.) 519 (Minus 300 men lost in the actions at Bruch on June 6 and 14) ----- 2,163
Cavalry: 3rd Provisional Cuirassiers 409 3rd ” Chasseurs 416 Italian Chasseurs à Cheval 504 2nd Neapolitan ” 388 (Minus one squadron left at Barcelona, say 200) ----- 1,517
Artillerymen for eight guns 150 ----- 5,963
Duhesme had resolved to march on Gerona by the comparatively easy road along the sea-coast, rather than by the alternative route which passes further inland by the valley of the Besos and the town of Hostalrich. Even in the lowland, however, he found the somatenes prepared to oppose him. At the castle of Mongat, only six miles outside Barcelona, he met the first swarm 8,000 or 9,000 strong. They had procured a few guns, which they had mounted so as to sweep the road, and lay in disorderly masses along the crest of a rising ground. Duhesme, amusing them in front by a false attack, sent a strong column to turn their right flank: seeing themselves likely to be enveloped, the peasants fled after a short skirmish, in which they suffered considerable loss. Pushing onward, Duhesme arrived that same afternoon at the large open town of Mataro, a place of 20,000 souls given over to the manufacture of glass and cotton goods. The populace had hastily barricaded the outlets of the streets with carts and piles of furniture, and discharged two or three cannon against the approaching enemy. But Milosewitz’s Italian brigade easily burst through the feeble defences and took Mataro by storm. Its attempt at resistance was considered by Duhesme to justify its sack, and he granted the plunder of the town to his men, who only moved on the next day after having thoroughly robbed every dwelling of its portable goods and murdered a considerable number of the inhabitants. The French army of Catalonia was the most motley and undisciplined force of all the imperial hosts in Spain, and for that reason it was by far the most cruel and brutal in its behaviour to the natives, who had not as yet justified any such treatment by their manner of conducting the war. Any ferocity which they showed from this time onward was a well-deserved revenge for what they had suffered.
Leaving Mataro on the eighteenth, Duhesme arrived before Gerona on the twentieth, after burning most of the villages on the road, in revenge for the constant molestation which he suffered from the somatenes. He found the city placed in a state of defence, so far as was possible in the case of an old-fashioned fortress called upon to stand a siege at ten days’ notice. There was a small regular garrison, the Irish regiment of Ultonia, under its two lieutenant-colonels, O’Donovan and O’Daly: but this corps only counted 350 bayonets. In addition there were a few trained artillerymen, and the armed citizens of the town, not more than 2,000 in all, for Gerona had but 14,000 inhabitants. The place lies on either side of the small stream of the Oña, just above its confluence with the river Ter. On the south bank is the main part of the town, straggling up the side of a steep hill, which is crowned at its eastern end by an ancient citadel, known (like those of several other Catalonian towns) by the name of Monjuich. Further westward, along the crest of this hill, lie three other forts, those of the Constable, Queen Anne, and the Capuchins. These, like the citadel, are detached works, not connected by any line of wall but only by a ditch. The town, which is completely commanded by the four forts, has no protection on the south side of the Oña but a mediaeval wall, destitute of a ditch and not more than twenty feet high. But on the other side of the river, the northern suburb, known as the Mercadal, having no line of outlying heights to protect it, had been fortified in the style of Vauban with a regular front of five bastions, though, like the fortifications of the city, it was without a ditch.
Duhesme had no battering-train, and his force of 5,900 men was insufficient to invest the whole circumference of the city of Gerona and its forts. But, like Moncey before Valencia, he was resolved to make an attempt to storm the city by escalade, or by battering in its gates. He left alone the citadel and the line of works on the hill, only sending a single battalion to demonstrate against the fort of the Capuchins. His real attack was directed against the sole point where the old enceinte of the city is not fully protected by the forts, the gate of the Carmen, on the very brink of the Oña. In no very honourable spirit, he sent in one of his aides-de-camp, with a white flag, to demand the surrender of Gerona, and while that officer was conferring with the governor and the local Junta, suddenly launched his column of assault against the gate, hoping to catch the Spaniards off their guard. The attack was a failure: the heavy guns from the forts above silenced the French field-artillery which tried to batter in the gate. Then Duhesme sent forward a storming party, with artillerymen at its head bearing petards with which to blow open the entrance: but the heavy musketry-fire from the walls laid low the head of the column, and the rest swerved, and fell back to get under cover. A feeble demonstration beyond the Oña against the bastions of Santa Clara and San Francisco had not even the desired effect of distracting the attention of the defenders of the Carmen Gate.
Seeing his attack foiled, Duhesme sent in at dusk a second flag of truce, inviting the Junta of Gerona to send out deputies to confer with him on certain points which he was desirous of submitting to them. The Catalans were simple enough to comply with his offer: they would have been wiser to avoid all negotiations with such an enemy. For this parley was only intended to cover a second assault. Seeing that he could not hope to batter his way into the place by means of his light field-artillery, Duhesme was preparing a great escalade under cover of the night. The point which he chose for it was the bastion of Santa Clara, on the centre of the low front of the Mercadal, beyond the Oña. He collected a quantity of ladders from the neighbouring villages, and told off for the assault the three battalions of the brigade of Schwartz.
At ten o’clock[304] the Italians crept up beneath the ramparts, where the citizens on guard do not seem to have kept a good look out, and delivered their attack. But these raw troops, moving in the darkness, made many mistakes: the chief one was that many of the ladder-party went astray among the water-courses and field-walls, so that the provision of ladders proved insufficient. The garrison of the bastion, however, had been taken completely by surprise, and allowed the head of the column to escalade the twenty-foot wall with no more hindrance than a few musket-shots. The Neapolitan Colonel Ambrosio and the leading files had actually mounted, and driven back the citizens to the gorge of the bastion, when there arrived reinforcements, a company of the Regiment of Ultonia, which charged with the bayonet, drove the Italians back, and hurled them over the rampart. An Irish lieutenant, Thomas Magrath, and a Carmelite friar seized and overturned the ladders, at the cost of the life of the former. When the garrison began firing down into the mass of assailants crowded at the foot of the wall, and the neighbouring bastion commenced to discharge a flanking fire of artillery, the Italians broke and fled. A second attempt at an escalade, made two hours later at another bastion, failed even more lamentably, for the garrison were on the alert and detected the assailants before they drew near the walls.
[304] Napier says that the assault was delivered at seven in the evening, before dark (i. 79); but all the Spanish accounts speak of it as having taken place long after dark, though before midnight (cf. Arteche, Toreño, and Minali, quoted by the former); so does Foy (iv. 158), who fixes the hour as ‘between nine and ten.’
Convinced that he was too weak to take Gerona without siege-artillery, Duhesme broke up his camp and fled under cover of the night, marking his retreat by a third insincere attempt to open negotiations with the garrison. He hastily made off by the same road by which he had come, and returned to Barcelona by forced marches, dropping on the way one of his Italian brigades at Mataro [June 24]. In the whole expedition he had lost 700 men[305].
[305] Yet he had the hardihood to write to the Emperor that ‘after some slight skirmishing, he did not think it worth while to make a serious attack on Gerona’ (Nap. Corresp., xvii. 347).
So ended the first attempt on Gerona, to the great credit of its gallant defenders, and more especially to that of the weak Irish regiment which had borne the brunt of the fighting. Duhesme’s whole campaign bore a singular resemblance to that which Moncey was making at the same moment in Valencia, and, like it, was wrecked on the initial blunder of supposing that Spanish towns, defended by a population in a high state of patriotic enthusiasm, could be carried by escalade without any proper preparation by artillery. French generals soon got to know their adversaries better: the same levies that could be easily scattered in the open field were formidable under cover of stone walls.
On returning to Barcelona, Duhesme found that the insurgents of Central Catalonia had drawn close to the capital in his absence. Eight or ten thousand somatenes had come down to the line of the Llobregat, had broken its bridges, had entrenched themselves opposite its fords, and were preparing to blockade Barcelona. They had brought up a considerable number of guns taken from the batteries on the coast, which had so long kept watch upon the English. But of regular troops there were only a few present--a mixed body of 400 men from Lerida, and some small remnants of the old Spanish garrison of Barcelona. The command seems to have been held by Juan Baget, a lawyer of Lerida, who had been named colonel of miqueletes by the Junta of his native town. Duhesme was determined not to be deprived of his hold on the coast-plain by this tumultuary army. On the thirtieth he sallied out from Barcelona with Goulas’s French brigade and three of Lecchi’s Italian battalions, accompanied by the cuirassiers of Bessières. Though the line of the Llobregat is marked by steep banks, and though a considerable number of guns were mounted behind it, the position was too long and too much exposed to be capable of defence by undisciplined bands of mountaineers. While the Italians menaced its front, Goulas and Bessières forded the river and turned the flank of the Catalans. Chased out from the villages of San Boy and Molins de Rey by a sweeping charge, they were pursued across the plain, stripped of all their artillery, and forced to take refuge in their old positions along the edge of the mountains of Montserrat, after losing a considerable number of men.
Less successful was another stroke against the insurgents which Duhesme endeavoured to deal five days later. General Chabran, with the Italian brigade that had been left at Mataro, a regiment of French cavalry and a field-battery, moved out to clear the hills above the coast, and to sweep the valley of the Besos. He had before him the somatenes of the regions about Vich, Hostalrich, and Santa Coloma, under Francisco Milans, a half-pay lieutenant-colonel, who had been placed at their head by the local Junta. Chabran forced his way for some distance inland till he reached Granollers, always harassed but never seriously attacked by the insurgents. Milans, who showed all through his career a real genius for guerilla warfare, had ordered his levies never to stand when pressed, but to hang about the enemy’s line of march, cut off his pickets and scouting parties, and fall upon the baggage-train which trailed at the rear of his column. These tactics were perfectly successful: having reached Granollers after a most toilsome march, Chabran refused to push further among the mountains, turned back, and retreated to Mataro, accompanied home by the somatenes, who pursued him to the very outskirts of the town, and cut off his stragglers and many of his baggage animals [July 4].
The moment that the Catalan insurrection grew serious, Duhesme had sent repeated appeals for help to the Emperor: the land route to Perpignan being cut, he had to use small vessels which put out to sea at night, risked capture by the English ships lying off the coast, and when fortunate reached the harbours of Collioure or Port-Vendres, just beyond the Pyrenees. Napoleon looked upon the Catalonian war as a very small matter, but he was fully resolved that Duhesme must be succoured. Accordingly he determined to concentrate a division at Perpignan, but he refused to allot to it any of his veteran French troops. He swept together from the Southern Alps and Piedmont a most heterogeneous body of 7,000 or 8,000 men, even worse in quality than the motley army which he had entrusted to Duhesme. The command was entrusted to a capable officer, General Reille, one of the Emperor’s aides-de-camp, who was told to advance and relieve Figueras, after which he was to stretch out his hand to Duhesme, who would push northward to meet him. His improvised army consisted of two battalions of recruits just levied in the lately annexed duchy of Tuscany, and constituting the nucleus of a new regiment with the number 113, of a battalion of national guards, some mobilized gendarmerie, a battalion of the ‘Legion of Reserve of the Alps’ from Grenoble, five ‘battalions of detachments,’ and the single battalion which formed the contingent of the little republic of the Valais[306]. The cavalry comprised two squadrons of Tuscan dragoons, and two escadrons de marche of French cuirassiers and chasseurs. There seem to have been no more than two batteries of artillery allotted to the force[307]. Reille was informed that other troops from Italy would ultimately arrive at Perpignan, but that they were not to be expected till the end of July or the beginning of August. For the relief of Figueras and the opening up of communications with Duhesme he must depend on his own forces.
[306] The Valais was a republic from 1802 till 1810, when it was annexed to the Empire, as the ‘department of the Simplon.’
[307] From Nap. Corresp., 14,092, 14,150, 14,151, and 14,168, we get the composition of this force. They account for the following:
Two batts. of the 113th (Tuscans) 1,300 National Guards of the Pyrénées Orientales 560 1st Provisional Battalion of Perpignan (companies from the dépôts of the 1st, 5th, 24th, 62nd of the Line, and 16th and 22nd Léger) 840 2nd Provisional Battalion, similarly formed from the 23rd, 60th, 79th, 81st of the Line, and the 8th and 18th Léger 840 A mixed battalion of the 16th and 32nd French and 2nd Swiss 1,100 Another from the 7th and 93rd of the Line 840 Another from the 2nd, 56th, and 37th of the Line 840 One battalion of the ‘5th Legion of Reserve’ from Grenoble 500 Battalion of the Valais 800 Two squadrons of Tuscan Dragoons 250 Two escadrons de marche (French) 300 Two batteries of artillery 200 ----- 8,370
There were also nine companies of gendarmerie and ‘departmental reserves.’
Travelling with commendable rapidity, Reille arrived at Perpignan on July 3. Of all the detachments that were marching to join him he found that nothing had yet reached the frontier but the local national guards and gendarmerie, the two Tuscan battalions, a company of the 2nd Swiss Regiment, and artillerymen enough to serve a couple of guns. With no more than the Tuscans and the Swiss, less than 1,600 men in all, he marched on Figueras on July 5, dispersing on the way some bands of somatenes, who tried to oppose him at the passage of the Muga. He threw a convoy into the place and strengthened its garrison, but could do no more, for all the country beyond Figueras was up in arms, and his raw Italian recruits could hardly be kept to their colours. Indeed he was forced to make them march in solid columns whenever he moved them, for when ordered to deploy they always fell into disorder, and tried to make off to the rear[308].
[308] Foy, iv. 165, 166.
But by July 11 Reille had begun to receive many of the drafts and detachments which the Emperor was pouring into Perpignan, and having now three or four thousand men disposable, he resolved to strike a blow at Rosas, the small seaport town which blocks the coast-road from Perpignan to Barcelona. Marching through the plains of the Ampurdam he reached his objective, an insignificant place with a dilapidated outer entrenchment and a citadel of some small strength. It was defended by no more than 400 miqueletes, and had but five guns on its land-front. But the little garrison showed a bold face, and when Reille proceeded to invest Rosas he found himself attacked from the rear by four or five thousand somatenes levied by Don Juan Claros, a retired infantry captain who had called to arms the peasantry of the coast. They beset the besiegers so fiercely that Reille resolved to abandon the investment, a determination which was assisted by the sight of a British line-of-battle ship[309] landing marines to strengthen the garrison. Accordingly he cut his way back to Figueras on the twelfth, harassed all the way by the bands of Claros, who killed or took no less than 200 of his men[310]. Rosas was to defy capture for some months more, for Reille’s next effort was, by his master’s direction, devoted to a more important object--the clearing of the great road from Perpignan to Barcelona, and the opening up of communications with Duhesme.
[309] The Montague, of 74 guns, Captain R. W. Otway.
[310] Foy, iv. 169.
SECTION V: CHAPTER II
THE STRUGGLE IN CATALONIA (JULY-AUGUST, 1808): THE SECOND SIEGE OF GERONA
For the first six weeks of the war in Catalonia Duhesme and Reille had been opposed only by the gallant somatenes. Of the handful of regular troops who had been stationed in the principality when the insurrection broke out, the greater part had drifted off to the siege of Saragossa, or to the struggle in the south. Only the Irish regiment at Gerona, and certain fragments of the disbanded battalions of the Guards from Barcelona had aided the peasantry in resisting the invader. The success of the Catalans, in hemming in Duhesme and checking Reille’s advance, is all the more notable when we reflect that their levies had not been guided by any central organization, nor placed under the command of any single general. The Junta at Lerida had done little more than issue proclamations and serve out to the somatenes the moderate amount of munitions of war that was at its disposition. It had indeed drawn out a scheme for the raising of a provincial army--forty tercios of miqueletes, each 1,000 strong, were to be levied and kept permanently in the field. But this scheme existed only on paper, and there were no means of officering or arming such a mass of men. Even as late as August 1, there were only 6,000 of them embodied in organized corps: the mass of the men of military age were still at their own firesides, prepared to turn out at the sound of the somaten, whenever a French column appeared in their neighbourhood, but not ready to keep the field for more than a few days, or to transfer their service to the more distant regions of the principality. The direction of these irregular bands was still in the hands of local leaders like Claros, Milans, and Baget, who aided each other in a sufficiently loyal fashion when they had the chance, but did not obey any single commander-in-chief, or act on any settled military plan. Their successes had been due to their own untutored intelligence and courage, not to the carrying out of any regular policy.
This period of patriotic anarchy was now drawing to an end; regular troops were beginning to appear on the scene in considerable numbers, and the direction of the military resources of Catalonia was about to be confided to their generals. The change was not all for the better: during the whole struggle the Spaniards showed themselves admirable insurgents but indifferent soldiers. After one more short but brilliant period of success, the balance of fortune was about to turn against the Catalans, and a long series of disasters was to try, but never to subdue, their indomitable and persevering courage.
We have already shown that the only body of regular troops available for the succour of Catalonia was the corps of 10,000 men which lay in the Balearic Islands. That these thirteen battalions of veterans had not yet been thrown ashore in the principality was mainly due to the over-caution of the aged General Vives, the Captain-General at Palma, to whom the charge of the garrisons of Majorca and Minorca was committed[311]. He had a deeply rooted idea that if he left Port Mahon unguarded, the English would find some excuse for once more making themselves masters of that ancient stronghold, where the Union Jack had waved for the greater part of the eighteenth century. Even the transparent honesty of Lord Collingwood, the veteran admiral of the Mediterranean fleet, could not reassure him. It was only when strong pressure was applied to him by his second in command, the Marquis del Palacio, governor of Minorca, and when he had received the most explicit pledges from Collingwood concerning the disinterested views of Great Britain, that he consented to disgarnish Port Mahon. His mind was only finally made up, when the Aragonese and Catalan battalions of his army burst out into open mutiny, threatening to seize shipping and transport themselves to the mainland without his leave, if any further delay was made [June 30]. A fortnight later Vives permitted Del Palacio, with the greater part of the Balearic garrisons, to set sail for the seat of war. The Aragonese regiment landed near Tortosa, and marched for Saragossa: but the bulk of the expeditionary force, nearly 5,000 strong, was put ashore in Catalonia between July 19 and 23.
[311] Neither Toreño nor Arteche mentions the trouble caused by this tiresome old man, to whom the delay in succouring Catalonia was due. For the negotiations with him see Lord Collingwood’s correspondence (Life, ii. 291, 292), and Foy (iv. 181).
Meanwhile affairs in the principality had taken a new turn. Duhesme had remained quiet for six days after Chabran’s check at Granollers, though his position at Barcelona grew daily more uncomfortable, owing to the constant activity of the somatenes. But when he learnt that Reille’s vanguard had reached Figueras, and that he might expect ere long to be aided by a whole division of fresh troops from the north, he resolved to renew his attack on Gerona, the fortress which so completely blocked his communications with France. Sending messages by sea to bid his colleague meet him under the walls of that place, he sallied out from Barcelona, on July 10, with the larger half of his army. This time he took with him the French brigades of Goulas and Nicolas only, leaving Barcelona to the care of Lecchi and the foreign troops. He felt that the situation was too grave for him to trust the fate of Catalonia to the steadiness of Lombard or Neapolitan regiments. So leaving four Italian and one Swiss battalion, 3,500 men in all, in the Barcelona forts, he marched for Gerona with seven French battalions, a regiment of Italian cavalry, and twenty-two guns, of which ten were heavy siege-artillery. At Mataro he picked up Chabran, who had been resting there since his check at Granollers on July 4, and incorporated with his expedition the Italian battalions which that officer had with him, as well as a regiment of French cavalry. This gave him a total force of some 7,000 men[312]; yet his march was slow and difficult. Milans with the somatenes of the upland was always hanging upon his left flank, and Lord Cochrane with two British frigates followed him along the coast, bombarding his columns whenever the road came within cannon-shot of the sea. At Arens de Mar Duhesme halted for no less than five days, either from sheer indecision as to the advisability of proceeding with his project, or because he was waiting for definite news of Reille. At last he made up his mind: two routes meet at Arens, the main chaussée from Barcelona to Gerona via Tordera, and a cross-road which seeks the same end by a detour through the small hill-fortress of Hostalrich. The three battalions of Goulas’s brigade were sent by this latter path, with orders to endeavour to seize the place if they could. The main column, with the battering-train, followed the high-road. Goulas found Hostalrich too strong for him: it was garrisoned by 500 miqueletes under Manuel O’Sullivan, a captain of the Regiment of Ultonia, who gallantly held their own against an attempt at escalade. The French brigadier thereupon abandoned the attack, crossed the mountains, and joined his chief before Gerona on July 22. Duhesme meanwhile had been harassed for three days by the somatenes of Milans, and, though he always drove them off in the end, had lost much of his baggage, and an appreciable number of men, before he reached the banks of the Ter. On the day after he was rejoined by Goulas he forced the passage of that river and took post before Gerona. On the next morning [July 24] he was rejoiced to meet with the vanguard of Reille’s division descending from the north. That general had started from Figueras two days before, with all the fractions of his motley force that had reached the front, two Tuscan battalions, the Swiss from the Valais, three French bataillons de marche, the two ‘Provisional Battalions of Perpignan,’ and some other improvised units, with a total strength of some 6,500 men. He established his head quarters at Puente Mayor to the north of the city, on the right bank of the Ter, while Duhesme placed his at Santa Eugenia on the left bank. There were good and easy communications between them by means of two fords, and the bridge of Salt, a little further from Gerona, was also available.
[312] The numbers of these corps before the fighting commenced in June had been:
Goulas’s Brigade (three batts.) 2,574 Nicolas’s Brigade (four batts.) 2,891 Two Italian battalions 1,300 3rd Provisional Cuirassiers 409 2nd Neapolitan Chasseurs 388 Artillery 250 ----- 7,812
But as the Italians, Goulas, and the cuirassiers had all been engaged several times, and had suffered serious losses, we must deduct 800 men at least, in order to get the figures of July 17. Foy gives only 6,000.
Thirteen thousand men seemed enough to make an end of an old-fashioned fortress like Gerona, held by a garrison which down to the first day of the siege counted no more than 400 regular troops--that same Irish regiment of Ultonia which had stood out against Duhesme’s first attack in June. It was fortunate for the defenders that at the very moment of the arrival of the French they received a powerful reinforcement. The light infantry regiment named the 2nd Volunteers of Barcelona, 1,300 strong, entered the city on the night of July 22[313], slipping between the heads of Duhesme’s and Reille’s columns. This corps had formed part of the garrison of Minorca: instead of being landed at Tarragona with the rest of Del Palacio’s troops, it was dropped at San Feliu, the nearest port on the coast to Gerona, and had just time to reach that place before its investment was completed.
[313] Not on the twenty-fifth, as Napier says (i. 83), following apparently the dates given by Cabanes. I have followed Arteche here, as his search into times and seasons seems more careful than that of any other authority.
Duhesme had resolved to avoid for the future the fruitless attempts at escalade, which had cost him so many men during his first siege of Gerona, and to proceed by the regular rules of poliorcetics. He had with him a battering-train more than sufficient to wreck the ancient walls of the city: accordingly he opened a secondary attack on the lower town on the left of the Oña, but turned the greater part of his attention to the citadel of Monjuich. If this work, which from its lofty hill commands the whole city, were once mastered, the place could not hold out for a day longer. By this arrangement the charge of the main attack fell to Reille, and Duhesme himself undertook only the demonstration against the Mercadal. The French began by establishing themselves on the lower slopes of the tableland of which Monjuich occupies the culminating point. They found shelter in three ruined towers which the garrison was too weak to occupy, and raised near them three batteries with six heavy guns and two howitzers, which battered the citadel, and also played upon certain parts of the town wall near the gate of San Pedro. The batteries in Duhesme’s section of the siege-lines consisted only of mortars and howitzers, which shelled and several times set fire to the Mercadal, but could make no attempt to open breaches in its walls.
The siege-approaches of the French before Gerona were conducted with an astonishing slowness: it was not till sixteen days after they had established themselves on the slopes round Monjuich, that they began to batter it in a serious fashion [Aug. 12]. This delay was partly due to the steepness of the ground up which the guns had to be dragged, partly to the necessity for sending to Figueras for extra artillery material, which could only be brought slowly and under heavy escort to the banks of the Ter. But Duhesme’s slackness, and the want of skill displayed by his engineer officers, were responsible for the greater portion of the delay. Moreover the investment of Gerona was so badly managed, that not only did the garrison keep up a regular communication at night with the chiefs of the somatenes who lay out on the hills to the west, but convoys repeatedly left and entered the town in the dark, without meeting a single French picket or patrol.
This delay of a fortnight in pressing the attack on Gerona led to two important results. The first was that the news of the capitulation of Baylen reached both camps, producing grave discouragement in the one, and a disposition for bold action in the other. The second was that Del Palacio and the troops from Minorca had time granted to them to prepare for interference in the siege. The marquis had landed at Tarragona on July 23, with all his division, save the regiment sent to St. Feliu and the Aragonese battalion which had been directed on Tortosa. Immediately on his arrival the insurrectionary Junta of Catalonia transferred itself from Lerida to Tarragona and elected Del Palacio Captain-General of the principality. Thus a real central authority was established in the province, and a single military direction could at last be given to its armies. The new Captain-General was well-intentioned and full of patriotism, but no great strategist[314]. His plan was to press Barcelona with the bulk of his regular forces, so that Lecchi might be compelled to call for instant help from Duhesme, while a small column under the Conde de Caldagues was to march on Gerona, not so much with the hope of raising the siege, as to aid the somatenes of the Ampurdam in harassing the investing force and throwing succours into the city[315].
[314] Collingwood (Correspondence, ii. 271) calls him ‘a fat unwieldy marquess, who, if his principles are good, has a very limited ability.’
[315] For Del Palacio’s intentions see his orders to Caldagues, quoted by Arteche (ii. 622).
Accordingly the main body of Del Palacio’s army, the regiments of Soria, Granada, and Borbon, with Wimpfen’s two Swiss battalions from Tarragona, marched on the Llobregat, drove in Lecchi’s outposts, and confined him to the immediate environs of Barcelona. The somatenes came to give help in thousands, and a cordon of investment was established at a very short distance from the great city. On the seaside Lord Cochrane, with the Impérieuse and Cambrian frigates, kept up a strict blockade, so that Lecchi, with his insufficient and not too trustworthy garrison of 3,500 Swiss and Italian troops, was in a most uncomfortable position. If it had not been that Barcelona was completely commanded by the impregnable citadel of Monjuich, he could not have maintained his hold on the large and turbulent city. His last outpost was destroyed on July 31: this was the strong castle of Mongat, six miles out on the coast-road from Barcelona to Mataro. It was held by a company of Neapolitans, 150 men with seven guns. Attacked on the land-side by 800 miqueletes under Francisco Barcelo, and from the sea by the broadside of the Impérieuse, the Italian officer in command surrendered to Lord Cochrane, in order to save his men from massacre by the Catalans. Cochrane then blew up the castle, and destroyed the narrow coast-road on each side of it by cuttings and explosions[316], so that there was no longer any practicable route for guns, horses, or wagons along the shore. Thus hemmed in, Lecchi began to send to Duhesme, by various secret channels, appeals for instant aid, and reports painting his situation in gloomy but not much exaggerated colours. He asserted that the somatenes were pushing their incursions to within 600 yards of his advanced posts, and that there were now 30,000 Catalans in arms around him. If he had said 10,000 he would have been within the limits of fact.
[316] For a good narrative of these operations see Lord Cochrane’s autobiography, i. 262-5.
On August 6 the Captain-General, after carefully arranging his troops in the positions round Barcelona, sent off Caldagues to harass Duhesme in the north. This enterprising brigadier-general was given no more than four companies of regulars, three guns, and 2,000 miqueletes from the Lerida district under their colonel, Juan Baget. Marching by the mountain road that goes by Hostalrich, and picking up many recruits on the way, he established himself on the fourteenth at Castella, in the hills that lie between Gerona and the sea. Here he was met by all the somatenes of Northern Catalonia, under their daring leaders, Milans and Claros.
The investment of Gerona was so badly managed, that when the news of Caldagues’ approach was received, two colonels (O’Donovan of the Ultonia Regiment and La Valeta of the Barcelona Volunteers) were able to penetrate the French lines and to confer with the commander of the army of succour. These two officers were really conducting the defence, for the titular governor, Bolivar, seems to have been a nonentity[317], who exercised no influence on the course of events. At a council of war which they attended, it was resolved to try a stroke which was far bolder than anything that the Captain-General had contemplated when he sent Caldagues northward. The relieving force was to attack from the rear Reille’s troops on the heights before Monjuich, while at the same time every man that could be spared from the garrison was to be flung on the breaching batteries from the front. Duhesme’s army in the plain beyond the Oña was to be left alone: it was hoped that the whole business would be over before he could arrive at the spot where the fate of battle was to be decided. There were somewhat over 8,000 men disposable for the attack: 1,000 regulars and four hundred miqueletes were to sally out of Gerona: Caldagues could bring up 7,000 more, all raw levies except the four companies of old troops that he had brought from Tarragona. He had also five field-guns. As Duhesme and Reille had 13,000 men, of whom 1,200 were cavalry, it was a daring experiment to attack them, even though their forces were distributed along an extensive line of investment.
[317] It is very odd, as Arteche remarks (ii. 611), that none of the contemporary Spanish narratives mention the name of Bolivar. They only speak of La Valeta and O’Donovan as heading the defence.
A bold and confident general, placed in Duhesme’s position, would not have waited to be attacked in his trenches. The moment that he heard of the approach of Caldagues, he would have drawn off half his battalions from the siege, and have gone out to meet the relieving army, before it could get within striking distance of Gerona. But Duhesme was not in the mood for adventurous strokes: he was chilled in his ardour by the news of the disaster of Baylen: he was worried by Lecchi’s gloomy reports; and he had been pondering for some days whether it would not be well to raise the siege and march off to save Barcelona. But the ravages which his bombardment was producing in the beleaguered city, and the fact that a breach was beginning to be visible in the walls of Monjuich, induced him to remain before the place, hoping that it might fall within the next few days. If this was his determination, he should at least have made preparations to receive Caldagues: but no attempt whatever appears to have been made to resist an attack from without.
On the morning of August 16, the Spaniards struck their blow. Between nine and ten o’clock in the morning, the 1,400 men of the garrison deployed from behind the cover of the citadel, and charged down upon the trenches and batteries of the besiegers[318]. They completely swept away the battalion of the 5th Legion of Reserve, which was furnishing the guard of the trenches, captured the siege-guns, and set fire to the fascines of the batteries. Then pushing on, they drove off the Swiss battalion of the Valais, and the two Tuscan battalions of the 113th Regiment, pressing them down hill towards Reille’s head quarters at Puente Mayor. The French general rallied them upon the 1st Régiment de Marche, which formed his reserve at this point of the line, and mounting the slope retook some of the works which had been lost. But at this moment Caldagues’ whole army appeared upon the heights, pressing forward in four columns with great confidence. The sight of these multitudes checked Reille, who hastily drew back, evacuated Puente Mayor and withdrew to the other bank of the Ter. Duhesme, on his side, abandoned all his outlying positions and concentrated his whole force in front of the village of Santa Eugenia.
[318] The Barcelona Volunteers under La Valeta led; the Ultonia, under Major Henry O’Donnell, supported.
The Catalans were wise enough not to descend into the plain, where Duhesme’s cavalry and guns would have had a free hand. Caldagues refrained from passing the Ter, and merely drew up his army on the slopes above Puente Mayor, ready to receive battle. But the expected attack never came; Duhesme held back all the afternoon, and then fled away under cover of the darkness. His losses in the fighting on the hills had not been heavy--seventy-five killed and 196 wounded--but his spirit was broken. He would not risk an assault on such a strong position with his motley and somewhat demoralized army. For a moment he thought of leading his whole force back to Reille’s base at Figueras: but the reflection that in this case Lecchi would probably be destroyed, and he himself be made responsible for the loss of Barcelona by the Emperor, deterred him from such a cowardly move. Bidding Reille take the northern road and keep open the communications with France, he drew off the rest of his army to the south to rejoin his Italian comrades. The move was made with some panic and precipitation: the remaining siege-guns were buried in a perfunctory fashion, and some stores destroyed. Then Duhesme marched away over the mountains, pursued by the somatenes of Milans; while Reille retired across the plains of the Ampurdam, and had a fairly easy journey to Figueras. Claros, who tried to harass his retreat, never dared to close in upon him in the open country, fearing his cavalry and guns. Far more toilsome was the lot of Duhesme’s column, which had to march for twenty miles through very broken ground, chased by the levies of Milans, to whom the whole district was familiar. When he reached the sea at Malgrat he found that his troubles were only growing worse. The somatenes hung on his right flank, while Lord Cochrane’s frigate the Impérieuse followed him on the left hand, giving him a broadside whenever his march lay within cannon-shot of the beach. Moreover, the peasants had been cutting and blasting away the road under Cochrane’s direction; and at each point where one of these obstructions had been made, it was necessary to drag the guns and wagons of the column across almost impassable hillsides[319]. Finding that he was making no appreciable progress, and that his men were growing utterly demoralized, Duhesme at last took a desperate step. He blew up his ammunition, burnt his baggage, cast his field-guns into the sea, and fled away by hill-tracks parallel with the shore. After long skirmishing with the somatenes he reached Mongat, where Lecchi came out to his aid with 1000 men and a battery--all that could be spared from the depleted garrison of Barcelona. There the Catalans stayed their pursuit, and Duhesme’s harassed battalions poured back into the city, sick of mountain warfare, half-starved, and carrying with them nothing but what they brought in on their backs [August 20]. As a fighting force for offensive operations they were useless for some weeks, and all that their general could do was to hold for foraging purposes as much of the open ground about Barcelona as he could manage to retain. Nothing more could be essayed till Napoleon should vouchsafe to send heavy reinforcements to Catalonia, for the purpose of reopening the severed communications with France.
[319] See Cochrane’s autobiography, i. 266.
Two obvious criticisms on these operations in the month of August must be made. The first is that Del Palacio might probably have destroyed Duhesme’s whole army, if, instead of sending out his lieutenant Caldagues with a handful of regulars and 2,000 miqueletes, he had marched on Gerona with his entire force, the 5,000 old troops from Port Mahon and the whole of the local levies of Central Catalonia. Lecchi was so weak in Barcelona that a few thousand somatenes could have kept him in check, for he dared not ungarnish the city. If the Captain-General had thrown every man into the struggle at Gerona, it seems certain that Duhesme must either have been annihilated or have fled away with Reille to Figueras, abandoning Barcelona to its inevitable fate.
The second comment is equally obvious: Duhesme’s generalship was even worse than that of Del Palacio. Since the Spaniards came against him not with the whole army of Catalonia, but with a mere detachment of 7,000 somatenes, he should have formed a covering force of 5,000 men, and have fallen upon them while they were still at some distance from Gerona. Instead of doing this, he allowed them to encamp for three days unmolested at Castella, a village no more than five miles distant from Reille’s outposts. There they concerted their operations with the garrison, and fell upon the investing force at the moment that suited them best. It is the extraordinary apathy or neglect displayed by Duhesme that justifies Caldagues’ bold stroke at the French lines. Finding the enemy so torpid, he might well venture an assault upon them, without incurring the charge of rashness of which Napier finds him guilty[320]. In other circumstances it would have been mad for the Spaniard, who had no more than 7,000 somatenes, to attack a French army 13,000 strong. But seeing Duhesme so utterly negligent--and his army strung out on a long front of investment, without any covering force--Caldagues was quite justified in making the experiment which turned out so successfully. Duhesme tried to extenuate his fault, by giving out that he had been about to abandon the siege even before he was attacked, and that he had orders from Bayonne authorizing such a step. But we may be permitted to join his successor St. Cyr in doubting both the original intention and the imperial authorization[321]. There is at least no trace of it in the correspondence of Napoleon, who as late as August 23, seven days after the fight outside Gerona, was under the impression that Reille’s division alone might suffice to capture the city, though he was prepared if necessary to support him with other troops. On the seventeenth of the same month, the day on which Duhesme began his disastrous retreat on Barcelona, Napoleon had already made up his mind to supersede him, and had directed St. Cyr, with two fresh divisions, to take post at Perpignan. But in the orders given to the new commander in Catalonia there is no sign that the Emperor had acquiesced in the raising of the siege of Gerona, though it may perhaps be deduced from a later dispatch that he had not disapproved of the strengthening of Lecchi’s garrison at Barcelona by the withdrawal of Chabran’s division from the leaguer[322].
[320] Napier, i. 89.
[321] St. Cyr, Journal de l’Armée de Catalogne, 1808-9, p. 15.
[322] The notices of the army of Catalonia and its intended operations are not very numerous in Napoleon’s dispatches. Foy accepts Duhesme’s story that he had intended all along to raise the siege after receiving from Bayonne an order to suspend active operations (iv. 177). But it seems difficult to read this into the Emperor’s dispatches; Napoleon received the news of Baylen on Aug. 3, but did not begin pushing large reinforcements on to Catalonia till Aug. 10 (Nap. Corresp., 14,249), nor supersede Duhesme by St. Cyr till Aug. 17 (Nap. Corresp., 14,256). On Aug. 23 he concludes that Duhesme would be best placed at Barcelona, but that Reille must take Gerona with his division, which may be reinforced by that of Chabot, newly arrived at Perpignan, or even by more troops due from Italy in a few weeks. The expectation which he expresses, that Reille alone might very possibly be strong enough to capture the place, is enough to show that he did not intend to raise the siege, but (at most) to order Duhesme to strengthen Lecchi with men drawn off from the leaguer--which is a very different thing from that general’s statement of the case.
Meanwhile Napoleon had recognized that even with Reille’s reinforcements, Catalonia was not adequately garrisoned, and on August 10 had directed 18,000 fresh troops upon the principality. These, moreover, were not the mere sweepings of his dépôts, like Reille’s men, but consisted of two strong divisions of old troops; Souham’s was composed of ten French battalions from Lombardy, Pino’s of 10,000 men of the best corps of the army of the kingdom of Italy[323]. A little later the Emperor resolved to send one division more, Germans this time, to Catalonia. Instead of the 13,000 men whom he had originally thought sufficient for the subjugation of the province, he had now set aside more than 40,000 for the task, and this did not prove to be one man too many. No better testimonial could be given to the gallant somatenes, than that they had forced the enemy to detach so large a force against them. Nor could any better proof be given of the Emperor’s fundamental misconception of the Spanish problem in May and June, than the fact that he had so long been under the impression that Duhesme’s original divisions would be enough to subdue the rugged and warlike Catalan principality.
[323] The Emperor writes to Eugène Beauharnais that the 10,000 Italians, horse, foot, and artillery, must be ‘un extrait de l’armée italienne dans le cas de se faire honneur,’ the best that could be got (Dispatch 14,249, Aug. 10).
Before Souham, Pino, and the rest could arrive on the scene, many weeks must elapse, and meanwhile we must turn back to the main course of the war in Central Spain, where the condition of affairs had been profoundly modified by the results of the Capitulation of Baylen.
SECTION VI
THE CONSEQUENCES OF BAYLEN
I. THE FRENCH RETREAT TO THE EBRO
While dealing with the operations of the French armies in the various provinces of Spain, we have observed that at every point the arrival of the news of Dupont’s disaster at Baylen produced notable results. It was this unexpected intelligence that drove the intrusive king out of Madrid within a week of his arrival, and ere the ceremonial of his proclamation had been completed. It brought back Bessières from the Esla to the Arlanzon, and raised the siege of Saragossa. Knowing of it Junot summoned his council of war at Torres Vedras with a sinking heart, and Duhesme lacked the confidence to try the ordeal of battle before Gerona. Beyond the Pyrenees its influence was no less marked. Napoleon had imagined that the victory of Rio Seco had practically decided the fate of the Peninsula, and at the moment of Baylen was turning his attention to Austria rather than to Spain. On July 25, five days after Dupont had laid down his arms, he was meditating the reinforcement of his army in Germany, and drafting orders that directed the garrisons of northern France on Mainz and Strasburg[324]. To a mind thus preoccupied the news of the disaster in Andalusia came like a thunderclap. So far was the Spanish trouble from an end, that it was assuming an aspect of primary importance. If Austria was really intending mischief, it was clear that the Emperor would have two great continental wars on his hands at the same moment--a misfortune that had never yet befallen him. It was already beginning to be borne in upon him that the treachery at Bayonne had been a blunder as well as a crime. Hence came the wild rage that bursts out in the letters written upon the days following that on which the news of Baylen reached him at Bordeaux. ‘Has there ever, since the world began,’ wrote Bonaparte to Clarke, his minister of war, ‘been such a stupid, cowardly, idiotic business as this? Behold Mack and Hohenlohe justified! Dupont’s own dispatch shows that all that has occurred is the result of his own inconceivable folly.... The loss of 20,000 picked men, who have disappeared without even inflicting any considerable loss on the enemy, will necessarily have the worst moral influence on the Spanish nation.... Its effect on European politics will prevent me from going to Spain myself.... I wish to know at once what tribunal ought to try these generals, and what penalty the law can inflict on them for such a crime[325].’ A similar strain runs through his first letter to his brother Joseph after the receipt of the news--‘Dupont has soiled our banners. What folly and what baseness! The English will lay hands on his army[326]. Such events make it necessary for me to go to Paris, for Germany, Poland, Italy, and all, are tied up in the same knot. It pains me grievously that I cannot be with you, in the midst of my soldiers[327].’ In other letters the capitulation is ‘a terrible catastrophe,’ ‘a horrible affair, for the cowards capitulated to save their baggage,’ and (of course) ‘a machination paid for with English gold[328]. These imbeciles are to suffer on the scaffold the penalty of this great national crime[329].’ The Emperor did well to be angry, for the shock of Baylen was indeed felt to every end of Europe. But he should have blamed his own Macchiavellian brain, that conceived the plot of Bayonne, and his own overweening confidence, that launched Dupont with 20,000 half-trained conscripts (not, as he wrote to Clarke, with vingt mille hommes d’élite et choisis) on the hazardous Andalusian enterprise.
[324] Napoleon to Jerome, King of Westphalia, July 25 (Nap. Corresp., 14,230): ‘L’Autriche arme: elle nie ses armements, elle arme donc contre nous.... Puisque l’Autriche arme, il faut donc armer. Aussi j’ordonne que la Grande Armée soit renforcée. Mes troupes se réunissent à Strasbourg, Mayence, Wesel,’ &c. Compare this with the great harangue made to Metternich on August 15 (Nap. Corresp., 14,254) and with Nap. Corresp., 14,248, which discusses the co-operation of Russia in a war with Austria.
[325] Napoleon to Clarke, Aug. 3 (Nap. Corresp., 14,242).
[326] i.e. Napoleon is aware that they will never allow the army to be taken home by sea, as the capitulation provided.
[327] Napoleon to Joseph, Aug. 3 (Nap. Corresp., 14,243): ‘L’Allemagne, l’Italie, la Pologne etc., tout se lie,’ is the Emperor’s phrase.
[328] Nap. Corresp., 14,244, 14,272, 14,283.
[329] A few words as to Dupont’s fate may be added. His experiences during the next four years throw a curious light on the administration of military justice under the Empire. He, together with Vedel, Chabert, Marescot, Legendre, and the aide-de-camp Villoutreys, were arrested on returning to France, and thrown into prison. They were told to prepare for a trial before the Supreme High Court (Haute Cour Impériale), and a long series of interrogatories was administered to them. A military commission drew up a preliminary report on the case: on reading it the Emperor saw that Dupont had a fair defence to make on all the charges brought against him, with the exception of that of military incapacity. He countermanded the order for a trial, and the prisoners (after nine months of confinement) were released, but left under police surveillance. After Dupont had spent two years and a half of peace in the country-house of a relative, he was suddenly arrested at midnight on Feb. 12, 1812, and given a secret trial, not before a court of justice or a court-martial, but before a special military commission. He was allowed neither counsel nor documents, and forced to defend himself at forty-eight hours’ notice. The judges declared him guilty of having signed a capitulation containing ‘des conditions honteuses et avilissantes,’ but not of having surrendered without necessity, or of having shown cowardice or treason. Since the capitulation had been ‘contrary to the political interests of the Empire, and had compromised the safety of the State,’ while yet ‘there would be grave inconvenience in giving the accused a public trial,’ the court advised the Emperor to deprive Dupont of rank, title, and pension, and to relegate him to the country. The other accused officers might suffer the same penalties. Refusing to consider this a sufficient punishment, Napoleon shut up Dupont in the lonely fort of Joux, in the Jura, where he remained a prisoner till the fall of the Empire. Vedel and Legendre were pardoned, and afterwards served in Italy. Chabert and Villoutreys were put on half-pay.
Meanwhile he had to face the situation: within a few hours of the moment when Villoutreys placed Dupont’s dispatch in his hands, he had so far got over the first spasms of his wrath that he was able to dictate a general plan for the reconcentration of his armies[330]. We have compared the French forces in Spain to a broad wedge, of which the point, directed against the heart of the insurrection, was formed by the three divisions of Dupont’s corps. This point had now been broken off; but the Emperor, still clinging to the idea of the wedge, wished to preserve Madrid and to form in and about it a new army fit for offensive operations. With this force he would strike at the insurgents of Andalusia and Valencia when they marched on the capital, while Bessières in the valley of the Douro, and Verdier in the valley of the Ebro were still to preserve a forward position, and shield the army of the centre from the flank attacks of the Galicians and the Aragonese. The troops left around Madrid at the moment of the disaster of Baylen were parts of the three divisions of Moncey’s corps[331], one of Dupont’s, and the brigade which had escorted Joseph Napoleon from Burgos, together with 3,000 horse--a total of about 23,000 men. Bonaparte judged that this was not enough to resist the combined attack of Castaños and of the Valencians and Murcians of Saint March and Llamas. Accordingly he intended that Bessières should lend the King two brigades of infantry--a deduction from his force which would compel him to fall back from Leon into Old Castile[332]--and that Verdier should spare a brigade from the army in front of Saragossa[333], though it was none too strong for the task before it. Six battalions from the reserve at Bayonne were to make a forced march to Madrid to join the King. Thus reinforced up to 35,000 men, the corps at Madrid would be able, as the Emperor supposed, to make head against any combination of Spanish troops that could possibly be brought against it.
[330] The ‘Note sur la situation actuelle de l’Espagne,’ which forms No. 14,241 of the Correspondance. It is dated at Bordeaux, Aug. 2, the very day on which Villoutreys brought the news of the capitulation.
[331] Viz. Musnier’s division of Moncey’s corps 6,500 men Frere’s division of Dupont’s corps 4,400 ” Bujet’s brigade of Morlot’s division of Moncey’s corps 3,700 ” Remains (5 batts.) of Gobert’s division of Moncey’s corps 2,500 ” Rey’s brigade of infantry (Joseph’s escort) 2,000 ” Infantry and Cavalry of the Imperial Guard 2,500 ” Cavalry of the Line 1,700 ” ------ 23,300 ”
[332] Lefebvre’s brigade, which belonged to Morlot’s division of Moncey’s corps--it had been lent to Bessières for the moment--and Reynaud’s brigade, i.e. 5,300 foot, also two cavalry regiments, making 6,000 in all.
[333] Bazancourt’s brigade of two veteran regiments (14th and 44th of the line), the last that had arrived at Saragossa.
But all these arrangements were futile. Bonaparte at Bordeaux was separated from his brother at the Retiro by so many miles that his orders were grown stale before they reached their destination. His scheme was made out on August 2, but on the preceding day King Joseph and his whole army had evacuated Madrid. The terror of Baylen was upon them, and they were expecting every moment to find themselves attacked by Castaños, who was as a matter of fact celebrating triumphal feasts at Seville. With a haste that turned out to be altogether unnecessary, Moncey’s corps, escorting the King, his court, and his long train of Spanish refugees, crossed the Somosierra and did not halt till they reached Aranda de Duero, in the plains of Old Castile. Napoleon was forced to make other plans in view of this retreat, whose moral consequences were hardly inferior in importance to those of Dupont’s capitulation. For both the Spanish nation and the courts of Europe looked upon the evacuation of Madrid as marking the complete downfall of Napoleon’s policy, and portending a speedy retirement of the invaders behind the Pyrenees. It is certain that if the spirit of Joseph and his advisers had been unbroken, they might have clung to the capital till the reinforcements which the Emperor was hurrying to their aid had arrived. It is probable that the 35,000 men, of whom Savary and Moncey could then have disposed, might have held Castaños in check till the army from the Rhine had time to come up. Yet there is every excuse for the behaviour of the French commanders, for they could not possibly have known that the Spaniards would move with such astonishing slowness, or that they would refrain from hurling every available man on Madrid. And as a matter of fact the evacuation of the capital turned out in the end to be advantageous to Napoleon, for it inspired his adversaries with a foolish self-confidence which proved their ruin. If they had been forced to fight hard in New Castile, they would have been obliged to throw much more energy into the struggle, and could not have slackened their efforts under the false impression that the French were absconding in dismay to Bayonne.
When Bonaparte learnt that his brother had fled from Madrid and crossed the passes into Old Castile, he was forced to draw out a wholly different scheme from that which he had sketched on August 2. The King, he wrote, with Moncey’s corps, must take post at Aranda, where the Douro is crossed by the high-road from France to Madrid. His army should be strengthened to a force of 30,000 men: meanwhile Bessières and Verdier must protect his flanks. The former with 15,000 men should take Valladolid as his head quarters and guard against any attempt of Blake to resume the offensive. As to Verdier, since he had been instructed to abandon the siege of Saragossa--a grave blunder--he must be drawn back as far as Tudela on the Middle Ebro. From that point he would easily be able to ‘contain’ the tumultuary army of Palafox. If the Spaniards showed signs of pressing in on any part of the front, the King, Verdier, or Bessières--as the case might demand--must not hang back, but endeavour to shatter the vanguard of any advancing force by a bold stroke. At all costs the war must not be waged in a timid style--in short, to adopt a well-known military axiom, ‘the best defensive would be a vigorous local offensive[334].’ Meanwhile it should be known that enormous reinforcements were in march from the Rhine and the Elbe. This was indubitably correct, for on August 5 the 1st and 6th Corps of the ‘Grand Army,’ and two divisions of heavy cavalry, had been sent their orders to break up from their garrisons and set out for Spain[335]. The Viceroy of Italy and the Princes of the Confederation of the Rhine had also been directed to send large contingents to the Peninsula: the troops from Italy were to move on Perpignan and strengthen the army of Catalonia; those from the German states were to march on Bayonne and join the main army[336]. Somewhat later the Emperor directed still further masses of men to be drawn off from Germany, namely Marshal Mortier with the 5th Corps and two more divisions of dragoons[337], while the whole of the Imperial Guard came down from Paris on the same errand[338]. There were still nearly 100,000 of the old army left in Spain[339], and the reinforcements would amount to 130,000 more, a force which when united would far surpass both in numbers and in quality any army that the Spaniards would be able to get together in the course of the next two months.
[334] Note on the situation of Spain, Aug. 5 (Nap. Corresp., 14,245).
[335] Napoleon to Clarke, Aug. 5 (Nap. Corresp., 14,244).
[336] Napoleon to Eugène, Aug. 10 (Nap. Corresp., 14,249), and to Clarke (Nap. Corresp., 14,256).
[337] Napoleon to Clarke, Aug. 17 (Nap. Corresp., 14,256).
[338] Except of course the brigade of fusiliers and the three cavalry regiments which were already in Spain.
[339] Or 98,000 to be exact, unless Reille’s force in Roussillon be added.
It was from Rochefort and on August 5 that Napoleon sent off his orders to his brother to stay his retreat at Aranda de Duero, and to keep Bessières at Valladolid and Verdier at Tudela. Once more the distances of space and time were too much for him. Before the dispatch from Rochefort came to hand, Joseph and Savary had already abandoned Aranda: they left it on the sixth and by the ninth were at Burgos. At that city they were met by Bessières, who according to the King’s orders had fallen back from the Esla to the Arlanzon. Napoleon’s elaborate scheme for the maintenance of the line of the Douro had thus fallen through, as completely as his earlier plan for the defence of Madrid. Seeing that his orders were clearly out of date, Moncey and Bessières[340] agreed that they might be disregarded. The next line suitable for an army acting on the defensive was that of the Ebro, and to the banks of that river the dispirited army of France now withdrew.
[340] Savary had left the army on Aug. 4, and returned to France.
The head quarters were established at Miranda: the troops of Bessières and Moncey were massed at that place and at Logroño, with a strong detachment across the Ebro at Pancorbo, and some cavalry lying out as far as Burgos: Verdier’s army, after finally raising the siege of Saragossa, fell back on Milagro, the point where the Aragon falls into the Ebro. Thus some 70,000 men were concentrated on a comparatively short and compact front, covering the two great roads which lead to France by Vittoria and by Pampeluna. Against any frontal attack from the direction of Madrid the position was very strong. But a glance at the map shows that the flanks were not properly protected: there was nothing to prevent Blake from turning the extreme right by an advance into Biscay, or to prevent Palafox from turning the extreme left by a march on Pampeluna via Tafalla or Sanguesa. If either of these moves were made by a powerful force, the army on the Ebro would be compelled either to abandon its positions in order to go in pursuit, or else to leave them occupied by a detachment insufficient to resist a serious attack along the line of the high-road from Madrid. Both those operations were ultimately taken in hand by the Spaniards, but it was at too late an hour, when the reinforcements from Germany had begun to arrive, and when ample means were at the disposal of the French generals for repulsing flank attacks, without drawing off men from the line of the Ebro. The astounding slowness of the Spaniards, and the lamentable want of union between the commanders of the various provincial armies, ruined any chance that there might have been of success. The troops of King Joseph were safely installed in their defensive positions by August 15. On that day the leading columns of the Spanish army had only just arrived at Madrid. It was not till a month later that the number of troops brought forward to the line of the Ebro approached the total strength of the host of the intrusive King. The offensive operations of Blake and Palafox did not commence till the second half of September, when the columns of the ‘Grand Army’ were already drawing near to the Pyrenees, and all possible chance of success had long gone by. They were not developed till October, when the counter-stroke of the French was fully prepared. From August 15 down to the day of the battle of Zornoza (October 31) there are two months and a half of wasted time, during which the Spaniards did nothing more than stir up an ineffectual rising in Biscay and gradually push to the front scattered corps whose total did not amount to much more than 100,000 men. The troops of Bonaparte on the other hand--now under the orders of Jourdan, who arrived at Miranda on August 25[341]--had little to do but to ward off the feeble attempts to cut their communications in Biscay, and to incorporate, brigade by brigade, the numerous reinforcements which kept marching in from Bayonne. For even ere the three veteran corps from Germany came to hand, there was a continuous stream of troops pouring across the Pyrenees. Most important, perhaps, of all the arrivals was that of Marshal Ney, the toughest and most resolute of all the Emperor’s fighting-men, who brought with him a spirit of enterprise and confidence which had long been wanting in the army of Spain[342].
[341] See his Mémoires (pp. 66, 67) for the situation at this date.
[342] He arrived at Irun on Aug. 30 (Madrid Gazette, Sept. 17th, 1808).
SECTION VI: CHAPTER II
CREATION OF THE ‘JUNTA GENERAL’
On August 1, Madrid had seen the last of the French: yet it was not till the thirteenth that the Spanish troops appeared before the gates of the capital. Even then it was not the victorious army of Andalusia which presented itself, but only the Valencian corps of Llamas, a mere division of 8,000 men, which would not have dared to push forward, had it not known that Joseph Bonaparte and all his train were now far on their way towards the Ebro. During the thirteen days which elapsed between his departure and the arrival of the Valencians there was a curious interregnum in Madrid. It took some time to convince the populace and the local authorities that the hated invaders were really gone, and that they were once more their own masters. Nothing reflects the state of public opinion better than the Madrid Gazette: down to August 1, it shows the hand of a French editor; ‘His Majesty’ means King Joseph, and all the foreign intelligence is coloured with French views. On August 2 the foreign influence begins to disappear, and we note a very cautious and tentative proclamation by the old ‘Council of Castile.’ That effete body, shorn by the French of most of its prominent members, had repeatedly yielded to the orders of Murat and Savary: it had carried out many decrees of the new executive, yet it had never actually recognized the legality of King Joseph’s accession. Indeed at the last moment it had striven, by feeble methods of evasion and delay, to avoid committing itself to this final step. But we may guess that, had there been no Baylen, the Council would finally have made up its mind to ‘swallow the pill’--if we may use once more Murat’s characteristic phrase. However, the flight of Joseph had saved it from being forced to range itself on the side of the traitors, and its members were able to stay behind in Madrid without fearing for their necks. In their first manifesto there is not a word that could have offended Savary, if he had returned the next day. It preaches the necessity of calm, order, and quiet: no one must stir up mobs, compromise the public safety, or vex his respectable neighbours[343]. The rest of the paper on this and the two following days is filled up with essays on geography and political economy, lists of servants seeking places, and colourless foreign news many weeks old. Such piteous stuff was not likely to keep the people quiet: on August 4 a mob assembled, broke open the house of Don Luis Viguri (one of Godoy’s old confidants), murdered him, and dragged his body through the streets. Fearing that they too might be considered Afrancesados the Council published a second proclamation of the most abject kind. The ‘melancholy instance of insubordination’ of the previous day causes them ‘intolerable sorrow’ and is ‘unlikely to tend to public felicity.’ The loyal and generous citizens ought to wait for the working of the law and its ministers, and not to take the execution of justice into their own hands. The clergy, the local officials, every employer of labour, every father of a family, are begged to help to maintain peace and order. Then comes a page of notices of new books, and a short paper on the ethics of emigration! Of Ferdinand VII or Joseph I, of politics domestic or foreign, there is not a word. Two days later the Council at last makes up its mind, and, after a week of most uncomfortable sitting on the fence, suddenly bursts out into an ‘Address to the honourable and generous people of the capital of Spain,’ in the highest strain of patriotism: ‘Our loved King is in chains, but his loyal subjects have risen in his name. Our gallant armies have achieved triumphs over “the invincibles of Marengo, Austerlitz, and Jena.” All Europe stands surprised at their rapid victories. These fellow citizens of ours, crowned with the laurels of success, will soon be with us. Meanwhile the Council must beg the patriotic citizens of Madrid to abstain from riot and murder, and to turn their energies into more useful channels. Let them prostrate themselves before the altar in grateful thanks to God, and make preparations to receive and embrace the oncoming bands of liberators.’ Domestic intelligence becomes for the future a list of French atrocities, and of (sometimes apocryphal) victories in the remoter corners of Spain[344]. Foreign intelligence is served up with an English rather than a French flavour. The arsenal of ‘Volovich[345]’ is shipping scores of cannon and thousands of muskets for the use of the brave Spaniards, the treasures of Great Britain are to be poured into the hands of the insurrectionary Juntas, and so forth. All this comes a little late: the good intentions of the Council would have been more clear if they had been expressed on August 2 instead of August 7, when the French were still at Buitrago, rather than when they were far away beyond Aranda de Duero[346].
[343] Proclamation of the Council, dated Aug. 1, published Aug. 2 in the Gazette. There is an original copy of the broadsheet in the Vaughan Papers.
[344] On Aug. 9 the reader is invited to believe that Roussillon has risen against Napoleon, and that the peasantry have stormed its frontier-fortress of Bellegarde.
[345] i.e. Woolwich.
[346] It is hard to agree with Napier’s verdict that ‘The Council was not wanting to itself; the individuals comprising it did not hesitate to seize the reins of power when the French had departed, and the prudence with which they preserved tranquillity in the capital, and prevented all reaction, proves that they were not without merit, and forms a striking contrast to the conduct of the provincial Juntas, under whose savage sway every kind of excess was committed and even encouraged’ (Napier, i. 299).
It is really astonishing to find that the Council made a bid for power, and attempted to assume the pose of a senate of warm-hearted patriots, after all its base servility to Murat and Savary during the last six months. Its president, Don Arias Mon y Velarde, actually had the audacity to write a circular-note to the various provincial Juntas of Spain, proposing that, as a single central government must obviously be established, they should send representatives to Madrid to concert with the Council on means of defence, and lend it the aid of their influence and authority. That such a discredited body should attempt to assume a kind of presidential authority over the local Juntas who had raised and directed the insurrection was absurd. The replies which were returned were of the most uncompromising kind: the Galician Junta taunted the Council with having been ‘the most active instrument of the Usurper.’ Palafox, speaking for Aragon, wrote that it ‘was a corporation which had not done its duty.’ The active and ambitious Junta of Seville wished to accuse the Council before the face of the Spanish people ‘of having subverted the fundamental laws of the realm, of having given the enemy every facility for seizing the domination of Spain, of having lost all legal authority and become null and void, and of being suspected of deliberate treason of the most atrocious sort possible.’ The Valencians voted that ‘no public body of any kind ought to enter into correspondence with the Council of Castile, or come to any understanding with it[347].’ All these rebuffs to the Council were well deserved, and it is clear that the provincial Juntas were entirely justified in their action. But it is to be feared that there lay at the bottom of their hearts not merely honest indignation at the impudent proposal that had been laid before them, but a not unnatural desire to cling as long as possible to their existing power and authority. In many of the provinces there was shown a most unworthy and unwise reluctance to proceed at once to the construction of a single governing body for Spain, even when the proposal was put forward not by a discredited corporation like the Council, but by men of undoubted patriotism.
[347] All these quotations come from the documents inserted by Toreño in his fifth book (i. 262).
The credit of starting a serious agitation for the erection of a ‘Supreme Junta’ must be given to the Murcians, whose councils were guided by the old statesman Florida Blanca, a survivor from the days of Charles III. As far back as June 22 they had issued a proclamation setting forth the evils of provincial particularism, and advocating the establishment of a central government. None of the other Juntas ventured openly to oppose this laudable design, and some of them did their best to further it. But there were others who clung to power, and were determined to surrender it at as late a date as they could manage. The Junta of Seville was far the worst: that body--as we have had occasion to mention in another place--was largely in the hands of intriguers, and had put forth unjustifiable claims to domination in the whole southern part of the realm, even usurping the title of ‘Supreme Junta of Spain and the Indies[348].’ In their desire for self-aggrandizement they took most unjustifiable steps: they suppressed Florida Blanca’s Murcian proclamation, lest it might stir up an agitation in Andalusia in behalf of the establishment of a central government[349]. But this was a comparatively venial sin: their worst act was to stay the march of Castaños on Madrid after Baylen. The pretext used was that they wished to welcome the victorious general and his army with triumphal entries and feasts of rejoicing--things entirely out of place, so long as the French were still holding the capital of the realm. To his own entire dissatisfaction Castaños was dragged back to Seville, there to display the captured guns and flags of the French, and to be received with salvos fired by patriotic ladies who had learnt the drill of the artilleryman[350]. But he soon found to his disgust that the Junta was really aiming at the employment of his troops not for national purposes but for their own aggrandizement. They wished to speak with 40,000 men at their back, and were most reluctant to let the army pass the Sierra Morena, lest it should get out of their control. Their most iniquitous design was to overawe by armed force their neighbours, the Junta of Granada, who refused to recognize them as a central authority for Andalusia, and had given their assent to the Murcian proposal for the prompt formation of a national government. They were actually issuing orders for a division to march against the Granadans, when Castaños--though a man of mild and conciliatory manners--burst out in wrath at the council board. Springing up from his chair and smiting the table a resounding blow, he exclaimed, ‘Who is the man that dares bid the troops march without my leave? Away with all provincial differences: I am the general of the Spanish nation, I am in command of an honourable army, and we are not going to allow any one to stir up civil war[351].’ Conscious that the regiments would follow the victor of Baylen, and refuse obedience to mere civilians, the Junta dropped their suicidal project. But they turned all their energy into devising pretexts for delaying the march of the army on Madrid. Their selfishness was undisguised: when Castaños begged for leave to march on the capital without further delay[352], the Conde de Tilly (the most intriguing spirit among all the politicians of Seville) responded with the simple question, ‘And what then will become of us?’ He then moved that the Junta of Andalusia should concern itself with Andalusia and Portugal alone, and not interfere in what went on beyond the Sierra Morena. This proposal was a little too strong even for the narrow-minded particularists of the Junta: but though they let Castaños go, they contrived excuses for delaying the march of the greater part of his army. He did not get to Madrid till August 23, more than a month after Baylen, and then brought with him only the single division of La Peña, about 7,000 strong. The other three divisions, those of Reding, Jones, and Coupigny, did not cross the Sierra Morena for many weeks after, and some of the troops had not even left Andalusia at the moment when the French resumed offensive operations in October. On various specious pretences the Junta detained many regiments at Seville and Cadiz, giving out that they were to form the nucleus of a new ‘army of reserve,’ which was still a mere skeleton three months after Baylen had been fought. If we compare the Andalusian army-list of November with that of July, we find that only seven new battalions[353] had joined the army of Castaños in time to fight on the Ebro. It is true that a new division had been also raised in Granada, and sent to Catalonia under General Reding, but this was due to the energy of the Junta of that small kingdom, which was far more active than that of Seville. Andalusia had 40,000 men under arms in July, and no more than 50,000 at the beginning of November, though the Junta had promised to have at least thirty reserve battalions ready before the end of the autumn, and had received from England enormous stores of muskets and clothing for their equipment.
[348] See page 69.
[349] Lord Collingwood’s Correspondence, ii. 98.
[350] Arteche, ii. 124.
[351] Toreño, i. 264.
[352] This story is told by Lord Collingwood, in an official dispatch to Castlereagh, dated July 29. He states that he knows that the colloquy took place, and clearly had the information from Castaños himself (Collingwood Correspondence, ii. 199).
[353] Tiradores de España, Provincial de Cadiz, Carmona, Baylen, Navas de Tolosa, 3rd and 5th Volunteers of Seville.
In the northern parts of Spain there was almost as much confusion, particularism, and selfishness as in the south. The main sources of trouble were the rivalry of the Juntas of Asturias and Galicia, and the extravagant claims of the aged and imbecile Cuesta, in virtue of his position as Captain-General of Castile. It will be remembered that in June insurrectionary Juntas had been established at Leon and Valladolid, the former purporting to represent the kingdom of Leon, the latter the kingdom of Old Castile. Each had been under the thumb of Cuesta, who looked upon them as nothing more than committees established under his authority for the civil government of the provinces of the Douro. But the disaster of Medina de Rio Seco destroyed both the power and the credit of the Captain-General. Flying before the French, the Juntas took refuge in Galicia, where they settled down at Ponferrada for a few days, and then moved to Lugo, whither the Junta of Galicia came out to meet them. The three bodies, joining in common session, chose as their president Don Antonio Valdes, the Bailiff of the Knights of Malta, who was one of the representatives of Castile. They claimed to be recognized as the supreme civil government of Northern Spain, but their position was weakened by two mischances. The Asturian Junta refused to have anything to do with them, and persisted in remaining sovereign within the borders of its own principality. Even more vexatious was the conduct of Cuesta: though he was wandering in the mountains with only three or four thousand raw levies--the wrecks of Rio Seco--he refused to recognize any authority in the three federated Juntas, and pretended to revoke by his proclamation any powers vested in those of Castile and Leon. The fact was that he knew that they would lend support to his military rival Blake, and not to himself. He feigned to regard the Captains-General and the old Audiencias, or provincial tribunals, as the sole legitimate powers left in the kingdom, and to consider the Juntas as irregular assemblies destitute of any valid authority. In what a scandalous form he translated his theories into action, we shall soon see. Meanwhile he refused to co-operate with the troops of Galicia, and made no attempt to follow the retreating French. All his efforts were directed to increasing the numbers of the mass of raw levies which he called the ‘Army of Castile.’ But from the whole of the provinces over which he claimed authority he had only succeeded in scraping together 12,000 men by the middle of September, though as far as population went they represented nearly a sixth of the people of Spain.
The want of any central executive for directing the armies of the patriots had the most disastrous results. By September 1 Castaños and Llamas had not more than 20,000 men at Madrid. Galluzzo’s army of Estremadura, which ought to have joined them long before, was still employed in its futile siege of Elvas. Cuesta was hanging back in Castile, as jealous of Castaños as he had been of Blake. The only armies which were in touch with the French were Palafox’s troops on the Ebro and the Valencian division of Saint March, which the Junta of Valencia (showing more patriotism than most of their colleagues) had pushed up to Saragossa to aid the Aragonese. Blake, with the powerful army of Galicia, had descended to Astorga when Bessières retreated to Burgos. But from Astorga he advanced most cautiously, always clinging to the southern slope of the Cantabrian hills, in order to avoid the plains, where the cavalry of the French would have a free hand. It was not till September 10 that he had concentrated his main body at Reynosa, near the sources of the Ebro, where he was at last near enough to the front to be able to commence operations.
The whole month of August, it is not too much to say, was lost for military purposes because Spain had not succeeded in furnishing itself with a central government or a commander-in-chief. It had been wasted in constitutional debates of the most futile kind. To every one, except to certain of the more selfish members of the Juntas, it was clear that a way must be found out of the existing anarchy. Three courses seemed possible: one was to appoint a Regent, or a small Council of Regency, and to entrust to him (or to them) the conduct of affairs. The second was to summon the Cortes, the old national parliament of Spain. The third was to establish a new sort of central government, by inducing each of the existing Juntas to send deputies, with full powers of representation, to sit together as a ‘Supreme Central Junta’ for the whole realm. The project of appointing a Regent had at first many advocates: it occurred to both Castaños and Palafox, and each (as it chanced) pitched upon the same individual as most worthy of the post[354]. This was the Archduke Charles of Austria, the sole general in Europe who had won a military reputation of the first class while contending with the French. He would have been an excellent choice--if only he could have been secured. But it did not take much reflection to see that if Austria allowed her greatest captain to accept such a post, she would involve herself in instant war with Bonaparte, and if such a war broke out the Archduke would be wanted on the Danube rather than upon the Ebro. There was no other name likely to command general confidence. Some spoke of the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo[355], the last prince of the Spanish royal house who remained in the realm. But he was an insignificant and incapable person, and much discredited by his dallyings with Murat in the days before the insurrection had begun. Clearly he would be no more than a puppet, worked by some astute person behind the viceregal throne. Other names suggested were those of the young Dom Pedro of Portugal (son of the Prince-Regent John), and of Prince Leopold, the son of Ferdinand IV of Sicily. The former was a grandson, the latter a nephew of Charles IV. Both therefore were near to the throne, but both were foreigners, young, untried in matters of state, and utterly unknown to the Spaniards. Dom Pedro’s claims were not strongly pushed, but the Sicilian court made a strenuous attempt to forward those of Prince Leopold. Their ambassador in London tried to enlist the support of the English Government for him: but Canning and Castlereagh were anxious to avoid any appearance of dictating orders to Spain, and firmly refused to countenance the project. Before their reply came to hand, King Ferdinand (or rather that old intriguer, his spouse, and her son-in-law the Duke of Orleans) sent the prince to Gibraltar, on a man-of-war which they had obtained from Mr. Drummond, the British minister at Palermo. By lending his aid to the plan this unwise diplomat almost succeeded in compromising his government. But most fortunately our representatives in Spain nipped in the bud this intrigue, which could not have failed to embroil them with the Juntas, none of whom had the least love for the Sicilian house. When the Thunderer arrived at Gibraltar [August 9] Sir Hew Dalrymple--then just on the eve of starting for Portugal--refused to allow the prince to land, or to distribute the proclamations which he had prepared. These were the work of Leopold’s brother-in-law, Louis Philippe of Orleans, who had accompanied him from Palermo with the design of fishing in troubled waters, a craft of which he was to show himself in later days a past master. If Leopold should become regent, Orleans intended to be the ‘power behind the throne.’ Dalrymple detained the two princes at Gibraltar, and when he was gone Lord Collingwood[356] took the same attitude of hostile neutrality. Tired of detention, Louis Philippe after a few days sailed for London, in the vain hope of melting the hearts of the British Cabinet. The Sicilian prince lingered some time, protesting against the fashion in which he was treated, and holding secret colloquies with deputations which came to him from many quarters in which the Junta of Seville was detested. But there was no real party in his favour. What benefit could come to Spain from the election of a youth of nineteen, whose very name was unknown to the people, and who could help them neither with men nor with money, neither with the statesmanship that comes from experience, nor with the military capacity that must be developed on the battle-field? After remaining long enough in Spanish waters to lose all his illusions, Prince Leopold returned to his mother in Sicily[357]. There had never been any foundation for a persistent rumour that he was to be made co-regent along with the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo and the Conde de Montijo. Not even the least intelligent members of the Juntas would have consented to hand over the rule of Spain to this strange triumvirate--an imbecile, a boy, and a turbulent intriguer. There was about as much chance that another vain project might be carried out--an invitation to General Dumouriez to take command of all the Spanish armies. Yet this plan too was seriously brought forward: the Frenchman would not have been unwilling, but the Spanish officers, flushed with their recent successes, were not the kind of people to welcome a foreign leader, and one whose last military exploit had been to desert his own army and go over to the enemy.
[354] See Arteche, iii. 118.
[355] First cousin to Charles IV, being the son of the Infante Luis, and brother of Godoy’s unfortunate wife.
[356] Napier is wrong in hinting that Canning lent himself to the Sicilian scheme (i. 177, 178) in order to disoblige Castlereagh. Collingwood’s dispatches show that he opposed it, as much as did Dalrymple, and thereby won approval from his government (Collingwood Correspondence, ii. 216, 217).
[357] He sailed on Nov. 4 (Madrid Gazette).
Much more specious, at first sight, than any project for the establishment of a regency, was the proposal mooted in many quarters for the summoning of the Cortes--whose name recalled so many ancient memories, and was connected with the days of constitutional freedom in the Middle Ages. But not only had the Cortes been obscured by the long spell of autocracy under the Hapsburg and Bourbon kings, but it was by its very constitution unsuited to represent a nation seeking for a new and vigorous executive. It was full of mediaeval anomalies: for example the Asturias had never been represented in it, but had possessed (like Wales in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) separate governmental machinery of its own. This might have been altered without much difficulty, but it was more fatal that the distribution of seats in the lower estates represented an archaic survival. Many decayed towns in Castile sent members to the Cortes, while on the other hand the warlike and populous province of Galicia had only one single vote. To rearrange the representation on a rational basis would take so long, and cause so much provincial jealousy, that it was recognized as practically impossible.
There remained therefore only the third plan for creating a supreme government in Spain--that which proposed that the various existing Juntas should each send deputies to some convenient spot, and that the union of these representatives should constitute a central authority for the whole realm. This scheme was not so clearly constitutional as the summoning of the Cortes would have been, nor did it provide for real unity of direction in so complete a way as would have been secured by the appointment of a single Regent. But it had the practical advantage of conciliating the various provincial Juntas: though they sacrificed their local sovereignty, they obtained at least the power of nominating their own masters. In each of them the more active and ambitious members hoped that they might secure for themselves the places of delegates to the new supreme assembly. Accordingly the Juntas were induced, one after another, to consent to the scheme. Public opinion ran so strongly in favour of unity, and the existing administrative chaos was so clearly undesirable, that it was impossible to protest against the creation of a Supreme Central Junta. Some of the provinces--notably Murcia, Valencia, and Granada--showed a patriotic spirit of self-abnegation and favoured the project from the first. Even Galicia and Seville, where the spirit of particularism was strongest, dared not openly resist the movement. There were malcontents who suggested that a federal constitution was preferable to a centralized one, and that it would suffice for the provinces to bind themselves together by treaties of alliance, instead of handing themselves over to a newly created executive. But even in Aragon, where federal union with Castile seemed more attractive to many than complete incorporation, the obvious necessity for common military action determined the situation[358]. Every province of Spain at last adhered to the project for constructing a Supreme Central Junta. Even the narrow-minded politicians at Seville had to assume an attitude of hearty consent. But their reluctance peeped out in the suggestion which they made that the Junta should meet, not at Madrid, but at Ciudad Real or Almagro in La Mancha, places convenient to themselves, but obscure and remote in the eyes of inhabitants of Asturias or Galicia. Their aversion to Madrid was partly caused by its remoteness from their own borders, but much more by jealousy of the Council of Castile, which still hung together and exercised local authority in the capital. Other Juntas showed their aversion for the Council in the same way, and ultimately the place selected for the gathering of the new government was the royal residence of Aranjuez, which stands to Madrid much as do Versailles or Windsor to Paris and London. This choice was an obvious mistake: the central government of a country loses in dignity when it does not reside in the national capital. It seems to distrust its own power or its legality, when it exiles itself from its proper abode. At the best it casts a slur on the inhabitants of the capital by refusing to trust itself among them. Madrid, it is true, is not to Spain what Paris is to France, or London to England: it is a comparatively modern place, pitched upon by Philip II as the seat of his court, but destitute of ancient memories. Nevertheless, it was at least infinitely superior to Aranjuez as a meeting-place. On geographical or strategical grounds they are so close that no advantage accrues to one that does not belong to the other. But for political reasons the capital was distinctly preferable to the almost suburban palace[359]. If the existence of the Council of Castile so much disturbed the Junta, it would have been quite possible to dissolve that discredited body. No one would have made any serious effort in its favour, even in the city of its abode.
[358] Note the federalist views of the Aragonese Miguel Principe, quoted by Arteche (ii. 121).
[359] Both Florida Blanca and Jovellanos were in favour of making Madrid the meeting-place. The Andalusians defeated them.
SECTION VI: CHAPTER III
THE ‘JUNTA GENERAL’ IN SESSION
The provincial Juntas, when once they had consented to sacrifice their local sovereignty, made no great delay in forwarding their representatives to the chosen meeting-place at Aranjuez. The number of deputies whom they sent to the Supreme Central Junta was thirty-five, seventeen provincial Juntas each contributing two, and the Canary Islands one. The Biscayan provinces, still wholly in the possession of the French, had no local body to speak for them, and could not therefore choose deputies. The number thus arrived at was not a very convenient one: thirty-five is too few for a parliament, and too many for an executive government. Moreover proportional representation was not secured; Navarre and the Balearic Islands were given too much weight by having two members each. Andalusia, having eight deputies for its four Juntas of Seville, Jaen, Granada, and Cordova, was over-represented when compared with Galicia, Aragon, and Catalonia, which had each no more than two. The quality of the delegates was very various: among the most notable were the ex-ministers Florida Blanca and Jovellanos, who represented respectively the better sides of the Conservative and the Liberal parties of Spain--if we may use such terms. The former, trained in the school of ‘benevolent despotism’ under Charles III, was a good specimen of the eighteenth-century statesman of the old sort--polite, experienced, energetic, a ripe scholar, and an able diplomat. But he was eighty years old and failing in health, and his return to active politics killed him in a few months. Jovellanos, a somewhat younger man[360], belonged in spirit to the end rather than the middle of the eighteenth century, and was imbued with the ideas of liberty and constitutional government which were afloat all over Europe in the early days of the French Revolution. He represented modern liberalism in the shape which it took in Spain. For this reason he had suffered many things at the hands of Godoy, and emerged from a long period of imprisonment and obscurity to take his place in the councils of the nation. Unhappily he was to find that his ideas were still those of a minority, and that bureaucracy and obscurantism were deeply rooted in Spain.
[360] He was born in 1743.
Of the other members[361] of the Supreme Junta, the Bailiff Valdez and Francisco Palafox, fresh from his brother’s triumphs at Saragossa, were perhaps the best known. Among the rest we note a considerable number of clergy--two archbishops, a prior, and three canons--but not more than might have been expected in a country where the Church was so powerful. Military men were not so strongly represented, being only five in number, and three of these were militia colonels. The rest were mainly local notables--grandees, marquises, and counts predominated over mere commoners. Some of them were blind particularists, and a few--like the disreputable Conde de Tilly--were intriguers with doubtful antecedents. The whole body represented Spain well enough, but Spain with her weaknesses as well as her strong points. It was not a very promising instrument with which to achieve the liberation of the Peninsula, or to resist the greatest general in Europe. Considered as a government of national defence, it had far too little military knowledge: a haphazard assembly of priests, politicians, and grandees is not adapted for the conduct of a war of independence. Hence came the incredible blindness which led it to refuse to appoint a single commander-in-chief, and the obstinacy with which it buried itself in constitutional debates of the most futile sort when Napoleon was thundering at the gates of Spain.
[361] For a complete list of the names and professions of the members of the Junta, see the Appendix.
The meeting of the Supreme Junta was fixed for September 25, but long ere that date came round the military situation was assuming new developments. The first modification in the state of affairs was caused by the abortive attempt of the Basque provinces to free themselves. The news of Baylen had caused as great a stir in the northern mountains as in the south or the east of Spain. But Biscay, Guipuzcoa, and Alava had considerable French garrisons, and the retreat of Joseph Bonaparte to the Ebro only increased the number of enemies in their immediate neighbourhood. It would have been no less patriotic than prudent for these provinces to delay their insurrection till it had some chance of proving useful to the general scheme of operations for the expulsion of the French from Spain. If they could have waited till Blake and Castaños had reached the Ebro, and then have taken arms, they might have raised a most dangerous distraction in the rear of the French, and have prevented them from turning all their forces against the regular armies. But it was mad to rise when Blake was still at Astorga, and Castaños had not yet reached Madrid. It could not have been expected that the local patriots should understand this: but grave blame falls on those who ought to have known better. The Duke of Infantado, who was acting under Blake, and Colonel Doyle, the English representative at that general’s head quarters, did their best to precipitate the outbreak in Biscay. They promised the Biscayan leaders that a division from Asturias should come to their aid, and that English arms and ammunition should be poured into their harbours[362]. At the first word of encouragement all Biscay took arms [August 6]: a great mass of insurgents collected at Bilbao, and smaller bands appeared along the line of the mountains, even as far as Valcarlos on the very frontier of France. But no external aid came to them: the Asturians--averse to every proposal that came from Galicia--did not move outside their own provincial boundary, and no other Spanish army was within striking distance. Bessières was able, at his leisure, to detach General Merlin with 3,000 men to fall on Bilbao. This brigade proved enough to deal with the main body of the Biscayan insurgents, who after a creditable fight were dispersed with heavy loss--1,200 killed, according to the French commander’s dispatch [August 16]. Bilbao was taken and sacked, and English vessels bringing--now that it was too late--5,000 stand of arms for the insurgents, narrowly escaped capture in its harbour. All along the line of the Basque hills there was hanging and shooting of the leaders of the abortive rising[363]. The only result of this ill-advised move was that Bessières was warned of the danger in his rear, and kept a vigilant eye for the future on the coastland. The Biscayans, as was natural, were much discouraged at the way in which they had been left in the lurch by their fellow countrymen, and at the inefficacy of their own unaided efforts. They were loth to rise a second time.
[362] See the letters of Doyle quoted in Napier, i. 287.
[363] Joseph Bonaparte to Napoleon, Sept. 5, 1808.
It was not till twenty days had passed since the fall of Bilbao that the first attempts at combined action were made by the Spanish generals. On September 5 there met at Madrid a council of war, composed of Castaños, Cuesta, the Valencian General Llamas, and the representatives of Blake and Palafox--the Duke of Infantado and Calvo de Rozas, intendant-general of the army of Aragon. These officers met with much suppressed jealousy and suspicion of each other. The Duke had his eye on Cuesta, in accordance with the instructions of Blake. Castaños and Cuesta were at daggers drawn, for the old Captain-General had just proposed a coup d’état against the Junta to the Andalusian, and had been repulsed with scorn[364]. The representative of the army of Aragon had been charged to see that no one was put above the head of Palafox. When the meeting opened, Cuesta proposed that it should appoint a single general to direct all the forces of Spain. The others demurred: Cuesta was much their senior in the army-list, and they imagined--probably with truth--that he would claim the post of commander-in-chief for himself, in spite of the memories of Cabezon and Rio Seco. They refused to listen to his arguments, though it was certain that unity of command was in every way desirable. Nor was any disposition shown to raise Castaños to supreme authority, though this was the obvious step to take, as he was the only general of Spain who had won a great battle in the open field. But personal and provincial jealousy stood in the way, and Castaños himself, though not without ambition, was destitute of the arts of cajolery, and made no attempt to push his own candidature for the post of commander-in-chief. Perhaps he hoped that the Supreme Junta would do him justice ere long, and refrained for that reason from self-assertion before his colleagues. Nothing, therefore, was settled on September 5, save a plan for common operations against the French on the Ebro. Like all schemes that are formed from a compromise between the views of several men, this was not a very brilliant strategical effort: instead of providing for a bold stroke with the whole Spanish army, at some point on the long line between Burgos and Milagro, it merely brought the insurgent forces in half-a-dozen separate columns face to face with the enemy. Blake, with his own army and the Asturians, was to be asked to concentrate near Reynosa, at the sources of the Ebro, and to endeavour to turn Bessières’ flank and penetrate into Biscay[365]. He would have 30,000 men, or more, but not a single complete regiment of cavalry. Next to him Cuesta was to operate against the front of Bessières’ corps, with his ‘Army of Castile,’ eight or nine thousand raw levies backed by about 1,000 horse. He undertook to make Burgo de Osma his point of starting. More to the east, Castaños was to gather at Soria the four divisions of the army of Andalusia, but at present he had only that of La Peña in hand: the Junta of Seville was detaining the rest. Still more to the right, Llamas with his 8,000 Valencians and Murcians was to march on Tudela. Lastly Palafox, with the army of Aragon and the Valencian division of Saint March, was to keep north of the Ebro, and turn the left flank of Moncey’s corps by way of Sanguesa: he could bring about 25,000 men into line, but there were not more than five or six regular battalions among them; the rest were recent levies. When the army of Estremadura should come up (it was still about Elvas and Badajoz), it was to join Castaños; and it was hoped that the English forces from Portugal might also be directed on the same point.
[364] I find the story of Cuesta’s projected coup d’état (in Toreño, i. 267), which was supposed to rest on the authority of Castaños alone, completely corroborated in Sir Charles Vaughan’s private diary. On Sept. 15 Vaughan, while passing through Segovia, met Cuesta, who told him ‘that two measures were absolutely necessary: (1) the abolition of the provincial Juntas, and the restoration of the ancient authority of the Captains-General and Real Audiencia; (2) The exercise of military force over the Junta at Ocaña (i.e. the supreme ‘Central Junta’) sufficient to compel them to elect an executive council of three or five persons to be placed at the head of different departments, and to be responsible to the nation at large.’ This is precisely what Cuesta proposed to Castaños.
[365] So Toreño. Arteche says that he was to concentrate at Aranda.
But meanwhile only 75,000 men were available in the first line; and this force, spread along the whole front from Reynosa to Sanguesa, and acting on wide external lines, was not likely to make much impression on the French. The numbers of the invaders were considerably greater than those of the patriot-armies. Jourdan had 70,000 men by September 1, and was being reinforced every day by fresh battalions, though the three corps from Germany were still far off. Before the Spaniards could move he appreciably outnumbered them, and he had the inestimable advantage of holding a comparatively short front, and of being able to concentrate on any point with far greater rapidity than was possible to his adversaries. Even had they thrown all their forces on one single point, the French, always using the ‘interior lines,’ could have got together in a very short time. The only weak point, indeed, in the French position was that Bessières’ vanguard at Burgos was too far forward, and in some peril of being enveloped between Blake and Cuesta. But this detachment, as we shall see, was ere long drawn back to the Ebro.
Before the campaign began the Spaniards obtained one notable advantage--the removal of Cuesta from command, owing to his own incredible arrogance and folly. It will be remembered that he regarded the Juntas of Leon and Castile as recalcitrant subordinates of his own, and had declared all their acts null and void. When they proceeded, like the other Juntas, to elect representatives for the meeting at Aranjuez, he waited till the deputies of Leon were passing near his camp, and then suddenly descended upon them. Don Antonio Valdez, the Bailiff of the Maltese Knights, and the Vizconde de Quintanilla, were arrested by his troopers and shut up in the castle of Segovia. He announced that they should be tried by court-martial, for failing in obedience to their Captain-General. This astonishing act of presumption drew down on him the wrath of the Supreme Junta, which was naturally eager to protect its members from the interference of the military arm. Almost its first act on assembling was to order him to appear at Aranjuez and to suspend him from command. Cuesta would have liked to resist, but knowing that his own army was weak and that Blake and Castaños were his bitter enemies, he had to yield. He came to Aranjuez, and was superseded by General Eguia. Valdez and Quintanilla were immediately released, and took their seats in the Supreme Junta.
The sessions of that body had begun on September 25. Twenty-four members out of the designated thirty-five had assembled on that day, and after a solemn religious ceremony had re-proclaimed Ferdinand VII, and elected Florida Blanca as their President. They then proceeded to nominate a Cabinet, chosen entirely from outside their own body. Don Pedro Cevallos was to be Minister of Foreign Affairs: he had served Ferdinand VII in that capacity, but had smirched his reputation by his submission to Bonaparte after the treachery at Bayonne. However, his ingenious justification[366] of his conduct, and his early desertion of King Joseph, were allowed to serve as an adequate defence. Don Antonio Escaño was Minister of Marine, Don Benito Hermida Minister of Justice, Don Francisco de Saavedra Minister of the Interior. The most important place of all, that of Minister of War, was given to an utterly unknown person, General Antonio Cornel, instead of to any of the officers who had distinguished themselves during the recent campaigns. He was to be aided by a supreme council of war, consisting of six members of the Junta, three of whom were civilians without any military knowledge whatever. No intention of appointing a commander-in-chief was shown, and the Minister of War corresponded directly with all the generals in charge of the provincial armies. Nothing could have been more ill judged; from the want of a single hand at the helm all the oncoming operations were doomed to inevitable failure. The supreme direction was nominally entrusted to the obscure war-minister and his councillors, really it lay with the generals in the field, who obeyed orders from head quarters only just as much as they chose. Each played his own game, and the result was disaster.
[366] His very elaborate vindication of himself can be read in his pamphlet of September, 1808, which was translated into English in the same winter, and reprinted in London. It contains a good account of the Bayonne business, and many valuable state papers.
A glance at the subjects which were discussed by the members of the Junta, during its first weeks of session, suffices to show the short-sightedness of their policy, and their utter inability to grasp the situation. They should have remembered that they were a government of national defence, whose main duty was the expulsion of the French from the soil of Spain. But military subjects furnished the smallest portion of their subjects of debate. They published indeed a manifesto to the effect that they intended to levy an army of 500,000 foot, and 50,000 horse--a much greater force than Spain in her most flourishing days could have raised or maintained. But this paper army was never seen in the field: less than a third of the number were under arms at the moment in December when the Junta had to fly from Aranjuez, before the advancing legions of Napoleon. Nor was it likely that a great army could be raised, equipped, and disciplined, while the central government was devoting the greater part of its attention to futilities. The most cruel comment on its work lies in the fact that its troops were ill furnished, badly armed, and half starved, at the moment when the provinces were doing their best to provide equipment, and every port in Spain was gorged with cannon, muskets, munitions, and stores sent from England--a great part of them destined to fall into the hands of the French. Partly from want of experience, but still more from want of energy, the Junta failed to use the national enthusiasm and the considerable resources placed at its disposal.
When we look at the main topics of its debates we begin to understand its failures. A good deal of time was spent in voting honorary distinctions to its own members. The President was to be addressed as ‘his highness,’ the Junta as a corporation was ‘its majesty,’ if we may use the ludicrous phrase. Each member became ‘his excellency’ and received the liberal salary of 120,000 reals (£1,200), besides the right of wearing on his breast a gold plaque with an embossed representation of the eastern and western hemispheres. There was a good deal of dispensing of places and patronage in the army and the civil service among relatives and dependencies of ‘their excellencies,’ but not more perhaps than happens in other countries in war-time when a new government comes in. At least the changes led to the getting rid of a good many of Godoy’s old bureaucrats. The real fault of the Junta lay in its readiness to fall into factions, and fight over constitutional questions that should have been relegated to times of peace. Among the thirty-five members of the Junta a clear majority were, like their president, Florida Blanca, Spaniards of the old school, whose ideas of government were those of the autocratic sort that had prevailed under Alberoni and Charles III. They looked upon all innovations as tinged with the poison of the French Revolution and savouring of Jacobinism and infidelity. On the other hand there was a powerful minority, headed by Jovellanos and including Martin de Garay, the secretary of the Junta, the Marquis of Campo Sagrado, Valdes, Calvo de Rozas, and others, who held more modern views and hoped that the main result of the war would be to make Spain a constitutional monarchy of the English type. How far this dream was from realization was shown by the fact that among the first measures passed through the Supreme Junta were ordinances allowing the Jesuits (expelled long since by Charles III) to return to Spain, recreating the office of Inquisitor-General, and suspending the liberty of the press. Such measures filled the liberal section in the Junta with despair, by showing the narrow and reactionary views of the majority. But the greater part of the time spent in session by ‘its majesty’ was wasted on purely constitutional questions. Firstly there was a long polemic with the Council of Castile, whose hatred for the Junta took the form of starting doubts as to the legality of its constitution[367]. It suggested that all constitutional precedents were against a body so numerous as thirty-five persons taking charge of the governance of the realm. Former councils of regency had been composed of three or five members only, and there was no legal authority for breaking the rule. The Council suggested that the only way out of the difficulty would be to call the Cortes, and that assembly would at once supersede the authority of the Supreme Junta. Instead of arguing with the Council of Castile, the new government would have done well to arrest or disperse that effete and disloyal body; but it chose instead to indulge in a war of manifestos and proclamations which led to nothing. To find the supreme government consenting to argue about its own legality was not reassuring to the nation. Moreover, Jovellanos and his followers spent much time in impressing on their colleagues that it was their duty to appoint a regency, and to cut down their own unwieldy numbers, as well as to provide machinery for the summoning of the Cortes at some not too distant date. To be reminded that they were no permanent corporation, but a temporary committee dressed in a little brief authority, was most unpleasant to the majority. They discussed from every point of view the question of the regency and the Cortes, but would not yield up their own supremacy. Indeed they proposed to begin legislation on a very wide basis for the reform of the constitution--business which should rather have been left to the Cortes, and which was particularly inappropriate to the moment when Napoleon was crossing the Pyrenees. The great manifesto of the Junta [October 26] sets forth its intentions very clearly. ‘The knowledge and illustration of our ancient and constitutional laws; the changes which altered circumstances render necessary in their re-establishment; the reforms necessary in civil, criminal, and commercial codes; projects for improving public education; a system of regulated economy for the collection and distribution of the public revenue ... are the subjects for the investigation of wise and thoughtful men. The Junta will form different committees, each entrusted with a particular department, to whom all writings on matters of government and administration may be addressed. The exertions of each contributing to give a just direction to the public mind, the government will be enabled to establish the internal happiness of Spain[368].’ From another official document we learn that ‘among the most grave and urgent objects of the attention of the Central Junta will be the encouragement of agriculture, the arts, commerce, and navigation[369].’
[367] For these documents see the Madrid Gazette of Oct. 4.
[368] Manifesto of the Junta to the Spanish people, Oct. 26.
[369] Madrid Gazette of Oct. 18, p. 1,301.
Clearly nothing could be more inappropriate and absurd than that this government of national defence should turn its attention to subjects such as the reform of national education, or the encouragement of the arts. It is equally certain that if it should propose to ‘consider the changes necessary in our ancient laws,’ it would be going beyond its competence; for such business belonged only to a permanent and properly constituted national assembly, such as the Cortes. This was not the time for constitutional debates, nor was the Central Junta the body that should have started them. All their energies should have been devoted to the war. But misled as to the situation by the long quiescence of the French army on the Ebro, they turned their minds to every topic that should have been avoided, and neglected the single one that should always have been before their eyes. It was in vain that Calvo de Rozas, the Aragonese deputy, and a few more, tried to keep their colleagues to the point. The majority fell to debating on the subjects on which the despotic and the liberal theories of government clash, and spent themselves on discussions that were as heated as they were futile. Meanwhile the time that should have been turned to account was slipping away, and the army was not being reinforced. A glance at the field-states of the Spanish troops, comparing those of August 1 with those of November 1, sufficiently proves this. The provinces which had been recovered by the retreat of the French to the Ebro were not doing their duty. The wide and populous regions of Old Castile and Leon had sent 4,600 men to Rio Seco in July: in October they had less than 12,000 under arms[370]. From New Castile there seem to have been raised nothing more than four battalions of Madrid Volunteers, a weak cavalry regiment, and two battalions of Cazadores de Cuenca and Tiradores de Castilla: at any rate no troops but these are to be found recorded in the lists of the armies that fought in October, November, and December, 1808. Even allowing that New Castile may have supplied recruits to its own corps of embodied militia serving with the Andalusian army[371], it is clear that, with a population of 1,200,000 souls, it ought to have done much more in raising new regiments. And this was the district in whose very midst the Junta was sitting! What little was done in Madrid seems to have been mainly the result of private enterprise: the Gazette for October is full of voluntary donations of horses, saddlery, and money, for the equipment of a corps of dragoons for the army of Old Castile, and of similar gifts received by Calvo de Rozas for the army of Aragon. But there are no signs of requisitions by the government for the purpose of raising an army of New Castile, which could certainly have been done. The kingdom with its five provinces ought to have given 40,000 men instead of 4,000: for Asturias, with only 370,000 souls, had raised 13,000: Aragon with 650,000 had placed no less than 32,000 levies in the field: and Estremadura with 420,000 had sent to the front 12,000 men by October, while keeping 10,000 more of undrilled recruits in its dépôts[372]. New Castile, as we have already had occasion to remark, had 1,200,000 inhabitants, and yet had only added to its original five battalions of militia six more of volunteers, and a single regiment of horse, at the moment when Napoleon’s armies came flooding across the Ebro. The Central Junta’s authority in Andalusia or Galicia was much limited by the survival of the ambitious local Juntas. But in Leon and the two Castiles there was, when once Cuesta had been got out of the way, no rival power in the field. No one was to blame but the central government, if the full resources of those regions were not utilized in September, October, and November. The English representatives at Madrid saw all this, and did their best to stir up the Junta. But it was not likely that mere foreigners would succeed, where Castaños and the other more energetic Spanish officers had failed. Already in October the situation appeared most unpromising: ‘We have made repeated representations,’ wrote Mr. Stuart, the British minister, ‘and I have given in paper after paper, to obtain something like promptitude and vigour: but though loaded with fair promises in the commencement, we scarcely quit the members of the Junta before their attention is absorbed in petty pursuits and in wrangling, which impedes even the simplest arrangements necessary for the interior government of the country.... In short, we are doing what we can, not what we wish: and I assure you we have infamous tools to work with[373].’ Exactly the same impression is produced by a study of the dispatches of Lord William Bentinck, our military representative at Madrid, and of the diary of Sir Charles Vaughan, who carefully attended and followed the debates of the Central Junta at Aranjuez. It was clear to any dispassionate observer that time was being wasted, and that the best was not being done with the available material.
[370] Napier is not quite correct in saying (i. 293) that ‘Leon never raised a single soldier for the cause.’ It had three battalions of volunteers (2,400 men) at Rio Seco, and raised four more at Leon, Zamora, Ledesma, and Benavente in September (Madrid Gazette, Sept. 28). But this was a poor contribution for a kingdom of four provinces and 620,000 souls.
[371] I see no proof that even this was done. There were only five of them, the Provinciales of Cuenca, Toledo, Ciudad Real, Alcazar de Don Juan, and Siguenza. Toledo and Alcazar had 579 and 595 under arms at the time of Baylen, and only 500 each, apparently, in Nov. 1808. See Arteche, iii. 496.
[372] For the Asturians see the table in Arteche (ii. 651): they were still 10,000 strong after having shared in Blake’s disastrous campaign. For the Estremadurans compare the list of regiments raised in the Madrid Gazette of Oct. 21, giving a total of 23,600 men, with the actual morning state of the Estremaduran troops at Madrid on their way to Burgos, 12,846 in all, given in Arteche (iii. 477).
[373] Stuart to Moore, from Madrid, Oct. 18, 1808.
This was all the more inexcusable because the nation was thoroughly in earnest, and prepared to make any sacrifices. The voluntary contributions made both by provinces and by individuals were astounding when the poverty of Spain is taken into consideration[374]. It was the energy and will to use them on the part of the leaders that was wanting. Moreover, England was pouring in supplies of all sorts: before November 16 she had sent at least 122,000 muskets and other military equipment of all kinds to the value of several hundred thousand pounds. Before the same date she had forwarded 4,725,000 dollars in hard cash[375], and Mr. Frere, the newly appointed minister, brought another million to Corunna.
[374] For details see the tables in Arguelles, and the grants recorded in the Madrid Gazette for September, October, and November.
[375] I take these figures as to what had been actually received from Vaughan, who was at Madrid, in constant communication with Stuart and Bentinck. They represent what had been paid over and acknowledged, not what had been promised or provided, and may be taken as accurate.
Instead of utilizing every possible resource the government went on debating about things unessential, as if the war had been ended at Baylen. It would neither conduct the new campaign itself, nor appoint a single commander-in-chief to conduct it in its behalf. With absolute truth Colonel Graham wrote from the head quarters of the Army of the Centre that ‘the miserable system established by the Junta was at the bottom of all misfortunes. I pitied poor Castaños and poor Spain, and came away disgusted to the greatest degree[376].’
[376] Graham to Moore, from Tudela, Nov. 9, 1808.
SECTION VI: CHAPTER IV
AN EPISODE IN THE BALTIC
It will be remembered that one of Napoleon’s preliminary measures, in his long campaign against the freedom of Spain, had been the removal of the flower of her army to the shores of the Baltic. In the spring of 1807 the Marquis of La Romana, with fourteen battalions of infantry and five regiments of cavalry, all completed to war strength, had marched for Hamburg. After wintering in the Hanseatic towns, Mecklenburg, and Swedish Pomerania, this corps had been moved up early in 1808 into Denmark[377]. It is clear that there was no military object in placing it there. The Danish fleet was gone, carried off by Lord Cathcart’s expedition in the previous September, and there was no probability that the English would return for a second visit, when they had completely executed their plan for destroying the naval resources of Denmark. France and Sweden, it is true, were still at war, but King Gustavus was so much occupied by the defensive struggle against the Russians in Finland, that it was unlikely that he would detach troops for an objectless expedition against the Danes. On the other hand the Anglo-Swedish fleet was so completely dominant in the Baltic and the Sound, that there was no possibility of launching an expedition from Denmark against Southern Sweden. Even between the various islands at the mouth of the Baltic, where the water-distances are very short, troops could only be moved at night, and with infinite precautions against being surprised on the passage by English frigates. Gothenburg and the other harbours of South-western Sweden served as convenient ports of call to the British squadron told off for the observation of the Cattegat, the two Belts, and the Sound. Nothing could be done against Sweden, unless indeed a frost of exceptional severity might close the waterway between Zealand and Scania. Even then an attempt to make a dash at Helsingborg or Malmö would involve so many difficulties and dangers that few generals would have cared to risk it.
[377] The Spanish troops, though the best of the whole army, do not seem to have much impressed the German observer with their discipline. See the Mecklenburger Von Suckow’s observations on what he saw of them in his From Jena to Moscow, p. 92.
La Romana’s corps formed part of an army under Marshal Bernadotte, whose sphere of command extended all over the south-western shores of the Baltic, and whose head quarters were sometimes at Schleswig and sometimes at Lübeck or Stralsund. He had considerable French and Dutch contingents, but the bulk of his force consisted of 30,000 Danes. In preparation for Napoleon’s scheme against the Spanish Bourbons, La Romana’s forces had been carefully scattered between Jutland and the Danish Isles, so that there was no large central body concentrated under the Marquis’s own hand. The garrisons of the Spanish regiments were interspersed between those of Danish troops, so that it would be difficult to get them together. In March, 1808, when the Emperor had at last shown his hand by the treacherous seizure of Pampeluna, Barcelona, and Figueras, the troops of La Romana were cantoned as follows. Six battalions were in the island of Zealand, mainly in and about the old royal residence of Roeskilde[378]. Four battalions and two cavalry regiments were in Fünen, the central island of the Danish group, and with them La Romana himself, whose head quarters were at Nyborg[379]. One battalion lay in the island of Langeland, close to the south coast of Fünen[380]. In the mainland of Jutland were three cavalry regiments and three battalions of infantry[381], quartered in the little towns at the southern end of the Cattegat--Fredericia, Aarhuus, and Randers. In Zealand the 4,000 Spaniards were under the eyes of the main Danish army of observation against Sweden. In Fünen La Romana’s 4,500 horse and foot were cantoned in small detachments, while a solid body of 3,000 Danes garrisoned Odense in the centre of the island, separating the Spanish regiments one from another. In Langeland, along with the Catalonian light battalion, were a company of French grenadiers and about 800 Danes. The troops in Jutland were mixed up with a brigade of Dutch light cavalry and some Danish infantry. Napoleon’s own provident eye had been roving round Denmark, and he had himself given the orders for the dislocation of the Spanish corps in the fashion that seemed best calculated to make any common action impossible. To keep them in good temper he had recently raised the pay of the officers, and announced his intention of decorating La Romana with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. Bernadotte, by his desire, displayed the greatest confidence in his auxiliaries, and took a troop of the cavalry regiment Del Rey as his personal escort while moving about in Denmark[382].
[378] Infantry regiments of Guadalajara and Asturias, of three battalions each.
[379] Infantry regiment of Princesa (three battalions), light battalion of Barcelona, and cavalry regiments of Almanza and Villaviciosa.
[380] Light battalion of ‘Volunteers of Catalonia.’
[381] Infantry regiment of Zamora, cavalry regiments Del Rey, Algarve, Infante.
[382] Arteche, iii. 151.
In spite of all this, the Marquis and his officers began to grow uneasy in April, 1808, for the stream of dispatches and letters from Spain, which had been reaching them very regularly during the winter, began to dry up in the spring. When the first communication from the new ministry of Ferdinand VII reached La Romana he found that it contained a complaint that the home government had received no reports from the expeditionary force since January, and that fifteen separate dispatches sent to him from Madrid had failed to get any answer. The fact was that Napoleon had been systematically intercepting every document which the war minister at one end of the line, and the Marquis at the other, had been committing to the French post[383]. The last dispatch had only come to hand because such an important announcement as that of the accession of King Ferdinand had been sent by the hands of a Spanish officer, whom Bonaparte or Fouché had not thought proper to arrest, though they had intercepted so much official correspondence. The Emperor himself had sent orders to Bernadotte that the news of the revolution at Aranjuez should be kept as long as possible from the Marquis and his troops[384]: and so it came to pass that only a very few days after the events of March 19 became known in Denmark, there followed the deplorable intelligence of the treachery of Bayonne and of the Madrid insurrection of May 2. These tidings produced the same feelings in Nyborg and Fredericia that they had caused at Seville or Corunna. But on the shores of the Baltic, further north than any Spanish troops had ever been before, the expeditionary corps felt itself helpless and surrounded by enemies. Yet as Joseph O’Donnell, then one of La Romana’s staff, observed: ‘The more they tried to persuade us that Spain was tranquil, and had settled down to enjoy an age of felicity under Napoleon, the more clearly did we foresee the scenes of blood, strife, and disaster which were to follow these incredible events[385].’
[383] Bourrienne, Mémoires, viii. 20.
[384] Napoleon to Berthier, March 29, 1808 (Nap. Corresp., 13,699).
[385] See his words quoted in Arteche, iii. 154.
On June 24 there reached Nyborg the intelligence which showed the whole of Napoleon’s schemes completed: it was announced to La Romana that Joseph Bonaparte had been proclaimed King of Spain, and he was ordered to transmit the news to his troops, and to inform them in General Orders that they were now serving a new master. The only commentary on this astonishing information which the Spanish officers could procure consisted of the nauseous banalities of the Moniteur concerning the ‘regeneration of Spain.’
A very few days later the first ray of hope shone upon the humbled and disheartened general. One of the earliest ideas of the British Government, on hearing of the Spanish insurrection, had been to open communications with the troops in Denmark. Castaños, in his first interview with the Governor of Gibraltar, had expressed his opinion that they would strike a blow for liberty if only they were given the chance. The fleet of Sir Richard Keates so completely commanded the Baltic that it would be possible to rescue the Spanish expeditionary force, if only it were willing and able to cut its way to the coast. But it was necessary to find out whether the Marquis was ready to risk his neck in such an enterprise, and whether he could depend on the loyalty of his troops.
To settle this all-important question some agent must be found who would undertake to penetrate to La Romana’s head quarters, a task of the most uninviting kind, for it was quite uncertain whether the Spaniard would eagerly join in the plan, or whether he would make up his mind to espouse the cause of Napoleon, and hand over his visitor to the French police. To find a man who knew the Continent well enough to move about without detection, and who would take the risk of placing himself at La Romana’s mercy, in case his offers were refused, did not seem easy. But the right person was pitched upon by Sir Arthur Wellesley just before he sailed for Portugal. He recommended to Canning a Roman Catholic priest of the name of James Robertson. This enterprising ecclesiastic was a Scot who had spent most of his life in a monastery at Ratisbon, but had lately come to England and was acting as tutor in the house of an English Catholic peer. He had some time before offered himself to Wellesley as a man who knew Germany well, and was prepared to run risks in making himself useful to the Government[386].
[386] See his interesting little book, A Secret Mission to the Danish Isles in 1808, published at Edinburgh in 1863 by his relative Alexander Fraser.
Under the belief that the Spaniards were still quartered in the Hanse towns and Holstein, Canning sent for Robertson and asked him whether he would undertake this dangerous mission to Northern Germany. The priest accepted the offer, and was dispatched to Heligoland, where Mr. Mackenzie, the British agent in this lately seized island, found him a place on board a smuggling vessel bound for the mouth of the Weser. He was safely landed near Bremerhafen and made his way to Hamburg, only to find that the Spaniards had been moved northward into the Danish isles. This made the mission more dangerous, as Robertson knew neither the country nor the language. But he disguised himself as a German commercial traveller, and laid in a stock of chocolate and cigars--things which were very rare in the North, as along with other colonial produce they were proscribed by the Continental System, and could only be got from smugglers. It was known that the Spanish officers felt deeply their privation of the two luxuries most dear to their frugal race, so that it seemed very natural that a dealer in such goods should attempt to find a market among them.
Getting to Nyborg without much difficulty, the priest took his fate in his hands, and introduced himself to La Romana with a box of cigars under one arm and a dozen packets of chocolate under the other. When they were alone, he threw himself on the Marquis’s confidence, owning that he was a priest and a British subject, not a German or a commercial traveller. The Spaniard was at first suspicious and silent, thinking that he had to deal with an agent provocateur of the French Government, who was trying to make him show his hand. Robertson had no written vouchers for his mission--they would have been too dangerous--but had been given some verbal credentials by Canning, which soon convinced La Romana of his good faith. The Marquis then owned that he was disgusted with his position, and felt sure that Napoleon had plotted the ruin of Spain, though what exactly had happened at Bayonne he had not yet been able to ascertain. Robertson next laid before him Canning’s offer--that if the expeditionary force could be concentrated and got to the coast, the Baltic fleet should pick it up, and see that it was landed at Minorca, Gibraltar, the Canaries, in South America, or at any point in Spain that the Marquis might select.
La Romana asked for a night to talk the matter over with his staff, and next day gave his full consent to the plan, bidding the priest pass the word on to Sir Richard Keates, and discover the earliest day on which transports could be got ready to carry off his men. Robertson tried to communicate with a British frigate which was hovering off the coast of Fünen, but was arrested by Danish militiamen while signalling to the ship from a lonely point on the beach. His purpose was almost discovered, and he only escaped by a series of ingenious lies to the militia colonel before whom he was taken by his captors. Moving further south, he again tried to get in touch with Sir Richard Keates, and this time succeeded. The news was passed to London, and transports were prepared for the deliverance of the Spaniards. Canning also sent to Fünen an agent of the Asturian Junta, who would be able to give his countrymen full news of the insurrection that had taken place in June.
Meanwhile La Romana had sounded his subordinates, and found them all eager to join in the plan of evasion, save Kindelan, the brigadier-general commanding the troops in Jutland, who showed such unpatriotic views that the officer sent to confer with him dropped the topic without revealing his commission. The plan which the Marquis had formed was rather ingenious: Bernadotte was about to go round the garrisons in his command on a tour of inspection. It was agreed that under the pretext of holding a grand field-day for his benefit, all the scattered Spanish troops in Fünen should be concentrated at Nyborg. The regiments in Zealand and Jutland were to join them, when the arrival of the British fleet should be reported, by seizing the Danish small craft in the harbours nearest to them, and crossing over the two Belts to join their commander.
An unfortunate contretemps, however, interfered to prevent the full execution of the scheme. Orders came from Paris that all the Spanish troops were to swear allegiance to Joseph Bonaparte, each corps parading at its head quarters for the purpose on July 30 or 31. This news caused grave disorders among the subordinate officers and the men, who were of course in complete ignorance of the plan for evasion. La Romana and his councillors held that the ceremony had better be gone through--to swear under compulsion was not perjury, and to refuse would draw down on the Spanish corps overwhelming numbers of Danes and French, so that the whole scheme for escape would miscarry. Accordingly the troops in Jutland and Fünen went through the ceremony in a more or less farcical way--in some cases the men are said to have substituted the name Ferdinand for the name Joseph in their oath, while the officers took no notice of this rather startling variation.
But in Zealand things went otherwise: the two infantry regiments of Guadalajara and Asturias, when paraded and told to take the oath, burst out into mutiny, drove off those of their own officers who tried to restrain them, killed the aide-de-camp of the French General Fririon, who was presiding at the ceremony, and threatened to march on Copenhagen. Next day they were surrounded by masses of Danish troops, forced to surrender, disarmed, and put in confinement in small bodies at various points in the island [August 1].
This startling news revealed to Bernadotte the true state of feeling in the Spanish army, and he wrote to La Romana to announce that he was about to visit the Danish Isles in order to inquire into the matter. Fortunately there came at the same moment news from England that the time for escape was at hand. On August 4, only three days after the mutiny at Roeskilde, the brigantine Mosquito, having on board Rafael Lobo (the emissary of the Asturian deputies), reached the Baltic, and communicated by night with some of the Spanish officers on the island of Langeland. The British fleet had sailed, and the time for action had arrived.
Accordingly La Romana gave the word to the officers in each garrison to whom the secret had been entrusted. On August 7, the troops in Fünen concentrated, and seized the port of Nyborg: the Danes were completely taken by surprise, and no resistance was made save by a gallant and obstinate naval officer commanding a brig in the harbour. He fired on the Spaniards, and would not yield till an English frigate and five gunboats ran into the port and battered his vessel to pieces.
On August 8 the troops in Jutland struck their blow: the infantry regiment of Zamora at Fredericia seized a number of fishing-vessels, and ferried itself over into Fünen with no difficulty. General Kindelan, the only traitor in the camp, had been kept from all knowledge of what was to happen: when he saw his troops on the move, and received an explanatory note from La Romana putting him in possession of the state of affairs, he feigned compliance in the plan, but disguised himself and fled to the nearest French cantonment, where he gave enemy a full account of the startling news. The cavalry regiments Infante and Del Rey had the same luck as their comrades of Zamora: they seized boats at Aarhuus, and, abandoning their horses, got across unopposed to Fünen. Their comrades of the regiment of Algarve were less lucky: they were delayed for some time by the indecision of their aged and imbecile colonel: when Costa, their senior captain, took command and marched them from Horsens towards the port of Fredericia, it was now too late. A brigade of Dutch Hussars, warned by Kindelan, beset them on the way and took them all prisoners. Costa, seeing that the responsibility would fall on his head, blew out his brains at the moment of surrender.
Romana had concentrated in Fünen nearly 8,000 men, and was so strong that the Danish general at Odense, in the centre of the island, dared not meddle with him. On August 9, 10, and 11 he passed his troops over to the smaller island of Langeland, where the regiment of Catalonia had already disarmed the Danish garrison and seized the batteries. Here he was safe, for Langeland was far out to sea, and he was now protected from the Danes by the English warships which were beginning to gather on the spot. A few isolated men from Zealand, about 150 in all, succeeded in joining the main body, having escaped from their guards and seized fishing-boats: but these were all that got away from the regiments of Asturias and Guadalajara, the mutineers of July 31.
For ten days Langeland was crammed with 9,000 Spanish troops, waiting anxiously for the expected British squadron. On the twenty-first, however, Admiral Keates appeared, with three sail of the line and several smaller craft. On these and on small Danish vessels the whole army was hastily embarked: they reached Gothenburg in Sweden on August 27, and found there thirty-seven large transports sent from England for their accommodation. After a long voyage they reached the Spanish coast in safety, and the whole expeditionary corps of the North, now 9,000 strong, was concentrated at Santander by October 11. The infantry was sent to take part in the second campaign of General Blake. The dismounted cavalry were ordered to move to Estremadura, and there to provide themselves with horses. La Romana himself was called to Madrid to interview the Junta, so that his troops went to the front under the charge of his second in command, the Count of San Roman, to take part in the bloody fight of Espinosa.
SECTION VII
NAPOLEON’S INVASION OF SPAIN