SECTION XXXV: CHAPTER II
THE TROUBLES OF A GENERALISSIMO.
WELLINGTON AT CADIZ AND FRENEDA
Having sent his war-worn divisions into winter quarters, where they were to remain with little change of billets till the next April, Wellington could turn to the consideration of many political and military problems for which he had been granted little leisure during the long stress of the autumn campaign. He fixed himself down at his old frontier head-quarters of 1811 and 1812, the village of Freneda near the Coa, between Almeida and Fuentes de Oñoro. It was a small and bleak place: observers often wondered why, with the whole of Portugal before him, he chose it for month-long residence in the worst time of the year. But in the winter of 1812-13 he remained stationary there from the end of November to the latter half of May—save for one rapid excursion to Cadiz and Lisbon, which took him away from December 12th to January 25th—an odd time for cross-country travelling in the Peninsula. Freneda had no amenities of any kind—save indeed that it was in the midst of a good fox-hunting country, a rare thing in Portugal. The Commander-in-Chief, on returning to his old base of operations, picked up his pack of hounds, and treated himself not infrequently to the one sort of field-sport in which he had a real delight. In other respects the village was dull and inconvenient—it could only just house his very small general staff; it was by no means a central point among the cantonments of his army; and its remoteness from Lisbon caused a delay of two or three days in all his correspondence to and from home. The only things to be said in its favour were that it was so close to the front line of the army on the Agueda that there would be no possibility of missing any information as to hostile movements, and that its remoteness and inaccessibility preserved the Commander-in-Chief from many interviews with useless and inconvenient visitors, who would have thronged around him if he had lodged in Lisbon. The intriguer, the man with a grievance, or the man with a job in hand, could not easily get to windy Freneda.
Only a steady perusal of Wellington’s Original and Supplementary Dispatches can give the chronicler an idea of the varied nature of his troubles and worries, during the winter that followed the Salamanca campaign. They were not merely those of an ordinary general in command of an army: his political position had now grown so important that not only did all happenings in the Peninsula fall within his sphere, but the Cabinet at home was continually consulting him on questions of general European importance. And in the months after Napoleon’s Russian débâcle the politics of Europe came to a crisis, such as had never been seen since first he assumed the Imperial crown. His domination was breaking up: his prestige had received a mortal wound: alliances were shifting: the wildest enterprises were advocated. There were those at home who proposed that Wellington should take his Peninsula army to Germany—or to La Vendée—and others who wanted to saddle him with a large Russian auxiliary force to be brought by sea from Reval or Odessa. On every scheme, however wild, he had to give his opinion.
But, placing in order of importance the many worries that beset Head-Quarters at Freneda, it would seem that the most constant and prolific source of trouble was a circumstance which ought rather to have lessened than increased Wellington’s military difficulties—if only men had been other than they were. It will be remembered that as early as 1809 the project of making him Generalissimo of all the Spanish armies had been mooted and rejected[270]. He had expressed his opinion that Spanish national pride made it impossible. ‘I am much flattered,’ he had written to the British Minister, ‘by the notion entertained by some of the people in authority at Seville of appointing me to the command of the Spanish Armies. I believe it was considered an object of great importance in England that the Commander-in-Chief of the British troops should have that situation. But it is one more likely to be attained by refraining from pressing it, and leaving it to the Spaniards themselves to discover the expediency of the arrangement, than by any suggestion on our parts.’
Much water had flowed under the bridge since 1809. The appointment had not come after Talavera or Bussaco, nor after the horrible disasters of Ocaña, the Sierra Morena, and the surrender of Valencia. But the summer campaign of 1812 had at last convinced the Cortes that the British general, who had so often been criticized and accused of selfishness and reluctance to risk anything for the common cause of the Allies, was the inevitable man. In the full flush of joy and confidence that followed the battle of Salamanca and the triumphal entry into Madrid, a bill was laid before the Assembly to appoint Wellington generalissimo of all the Spanish forces. It was supported by most of the leading men of the ‘Liberal’ party, introduced by the ex-regent Cisgar, and barely opposed by the ‘Serviles’, though one clerical member—Creux, afterwards Archbishop of Tarragona—raised objections to giving such a command to any foreigner, and expatiated on the selfish character of British commercial policy. Despite of such murmurs, the motion was carried by an immense majority, and the President of the Cortes was authorized to direct the Council of Regency to make the offer to Wellington. The form of words ran that considering the advantages of unity in command, and the urgent necessity for utilizing to the full the recent glorious triumphs of the allied arms, it was decreed that as long as the allied forces were co-operating in the defence of the Peninsula ‘Captain-General the Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo’ should have conferred upon him the supreme command of all of them, to be exercised in accordance with general orders, his authority to extend over all the provinces of the Peninsula. And the ‘illustrious chief’ was directed to correspond with the National Government through the Secretary of the War Office[271].
This decree reached Wellington on October 2, while he lay at Villatoro, conducting the siege of Burgos. He resolved to take up the long-delayed commission, provided that he should receive the permission of the Prince Regent to do so, and sent, through his brother at Cadiz, a letter of conditional acceptance. His consent to serve was not couched in very enthusiastic terms: being anxious to do all that could be done to support the legitimate quarrel of the Spanish nation with France, he had no objection to taking upon himself the additional labour and responsibility of commanding the Spanish armies. The delay which must be required, for getting leave from the Prince Regent to make a formal acceptance of the offer, seemed to him of secondary importance, because he was already in the habit of communicating his general views on operations to the Spanish generals, and of making suggestions to them, which always received the utmost attention. ‘I am convinced they will continue the same practice, even though I am not invested with the supreme command.’ These phrases look like deliberate sarcasm, considering Wellington’s former relations with Cuesta, Del Parque, Blake, and Mendizabal. But they probably mean no more than that the present commanders of the forces which were actually co-operating with him in 1812, Castaños, Morillo, and Carlos de España, had been loyal and obliging. Finally, ‘he hopes that in the new and prominent situation in which he is to be placed, he will have not only the full support but the confidence of the Spanish Government, Cortes, and nation[272].’
The inner meaning of these somewhat double-edged phrases is explained in a memorandum for Lord Bathurst, the British Secretary of State for War, which was sent home under the same cover as the Cadiz document[273]. It was eminently not a letter to be shown to Spaniards, and contained some of the most bitter expressions concerning them which Wellington ever penned. No use could be got out of their armies, he wrote, unless they were under his control. They had lost nearly all their guns and cavalry, and generally could not act in bodies separate from the Allied Army. Their discipline, equipment, and organization was as bad as ever: yet if put in line with his own troops they might behave quite well. He would prevent by good management repetitions of those terrible disasters to individual armies which had so often happened in past years. But his power over them must be made real, and for that purpose he intended to apply the financial screw. All subsidies advanced by the British Government to Spain must for the future be expended wholly on such Spanish troops as were actually employed in co-operation with the Anglo-Portuguese army, or else those troops would become a fresh burden on the military chest. And in his letter to Cadiz he had been careful to show that he did not intend to allow the Spanish Government to dictate a military policy to him, because they had placed their troops at his disposition.
These letters, sent off from the camp before Burgos on October 5, got to London on October 20, and the Prince Regent’s approbation of Wellington’s acceptance of the offer from the Cortes was granted at once[274]. The dispatch conveying it was delivered at Cadiz on the 17th of November, and on the 20th the Cortes confirmed its former decree, and sent off a formal warrant of appointment to the new generalissimo, which reached him at Freneda on December 4th. The confirmation was not made with such general approval as the original appointment—and for good reason. By this time it had become evident that Wellington was not about to drive the French over the Pyrenees: he had raised the siege of Burgos, and when the Cortes repeated their vote, was known to be in full retreat for Salamanca. Hopes from his success were no longer so high as they had been in September, and a nasty jar had been given to the whole arrangement by the mutinous conduct of Ballasteros, who (as has been shown in an earlier chapter) had issued a manifesto against all submission to foreign generals, and had refused to obey Wellington’s directions at a critical moment. It is true that Ballasteros had been arrested and imprisoned, without any consequent trouble[275]; but it was known that there were other Spanish generals who were not without sympathy with his views.
Having received his formal nomination as generalissimo, Wellington wrote to Carvajal, the Minister of War, on December 4th, one of the most stringent letters that any secretary of state has ever received. It reminds the reader of one of Napoleon’s epistles to Clarke or King Joseph. The Spanish Government, he said, had now a right to expect from him an accurate representation of facts, and he was going to perform this duty. The discipline of the Spanish armies was in the very lowest state; their efficiency was much deteriorated. How could any army be expected to keep order when neither officers nor men had received any pay for months—or even for years? But it was not financial arrears that explained all defects: even in corps—like those of the Galician and Estremaduran armies—which had recently been re-clothed and regularly paid by Wellington’s own exertions, insubordination and indiscipline were rife: they were as little to be depended upon in the field as the rest. The officers, with some few exceptions, were absolutely slack and careless: the desertion from the ranks immense. He had hesitated at accepting the command, when he thought of what he had seen of the Spanish troops of late. But having undertaken it, he would not relinquish the task because it was laborious and of doubtful success. There were four demands which he must make as a preliminary condition: the Government must give him power—
(1) To have under his control all promotions and appointments to command;
(2) To dismiss from the service any officer whom he thought deserving of such punishment;
(3) To apply the whole war-budget to such services as he might choose;
(4) To appoint to his head-quarters a Spanish chief-of-the-staff, to whom all military reports from the whole kingdom should be sent: so that nothing should take place without his knowledge. Through this officer he would correspond with the Regency, and send them regular reports.
He then proceeded to definite demands as to administration. The present state of military organization was absurd, burdensome, and expensive. The realm was overrun with unnecessary army-commanders and captain-generals, with immense and useless staffs. ‘For example, General Castaños is most usefully employed as commander of the 5th Army, whose territory consists of Estremadura and Castile. But there is a captain-general and a large staff in each of these provinces, though the troops in the former are not enough to make a full garrison for Badajoz, or those in the latter to make a full garrison for Ciudad Rodrigo[276].’ The captain-generals and their staffs have nothing to administer, are quite useless, and absorb money which should go to the army. In the same way the 2nd (Valencian) and 3rd (Murcian) Armies, together have a strength equivalent to two divisions, yet have each the full military and civil staff of a complete army[277]. So has the 9th (Cantabrian) Army, which is composed entirely of guerrillero bands. Only the Andalusian and Galician troops are sufficiently numerous to be worth calling armies at all.
The first thing to do is to cut down unnecessary commanders-in-chief and staffs. The Galician, Castilian, and Estremaduran commands should be at once amalgamated, and put under Castaños, with one single staff for all three. Probably the same should be done with the Andalusian, Murcian, and Valencian commands. An immense body of superfluous staff-officers must be sent back to Cadiz at once. As a second step he would have to revise the organization of the country into captain-generalships and intendancies. Captain-generals often hampered army-commanders; intendants must probably be put under military authority. This was no doubt wrong in principle. But the civil intendant was powerless, in a country just liberated from the enemy and full of trouble and disorder. He could not exert authority unless he were lent military assistance: yet he would probably fall out with the military chief, because their ends would be divergent[278]. ‘When the enemy is still in the country that must be done which tends most directly to drive him out—whatever constitutional principles may be violated in the process[279].’
Finally, Wellington resolved that he must come down to Cadiz in person to urge his schemes of reorganization on the Regency and the Cortes—obviously a most invidious task, since no nation likes to have administrative reforms thrust upon it by a foreigner—more especially by a foreigner whose tone is dictatorial and whose phrases seem almost deliberately worded so as to wound national pride.
On December 12th he started out to deal with the Cadiz bureaucrats, planning to cover the whole 300 miles from Freneda in six days. As a matter of fact he took eleven, partly because he was smitten with lumbago, which made riding painful, partly because he was delayed one night in the Pass of Perales, and two at Albuquerque, by floods, which made mountain-streams impassable for many hours. Immediately on reaching the seat of government, where he was received with great state if with little real cordiality, he started on his campaign against the Regency, the Cortes, and the Minister of War. It is much to the credit of the Spaniards that, though many of his demands were unpalatable, the greater part of them were conceded with slight variation of terms. It is curious to note the points on which the Regency proved recalcitrant and started argument. Of the four great preliminary conditions which Wellington exacted, they granted at once that which seemed the most important of all—the creation of a Spanish chief-of-the-staff to be attached to Wellington’s head-quarters, and conceded that all military correspondence should pass through his hands. The person selected was General Wimpffen, a Spanish-Swiss officer, of whom we have had to speak occasionally in dealing with Catalonian affairs—he had been Henry O’Donnell’s adjutant-general in 1810. He was a non-political soldier of good abilities, and Wellington found him laborious and obliging: there seems never to have been any friction between them. Secondly, the Regency granted the great point that the whole British subsidy should be applied to such military expenses as Wellington should designate: and they afterwards went so far as to order that in the recovered provinces nine-tenths of the taxes raised should be devoted to military purposes. But they haggled on the two conditions dealing with military patronage. Instead of giving the generalissimo power to revise all appointments, they proposed that ‘no officer should be promoted to a chief command, or the command of a division, or any extraordinary command, except at the recommendation of the general-in-chief. With regard to other promotions the rules of the Spanish service shall be strictly observed.’ This left all patronage from the rank of brigadier-general downward in the hands of the Minister of War and the Cortes. And whereas Wellington had proposed, as his second condition, that he should have power to cashier any officer whom he considered deserving of such punishment, the Regents offered him only the right of suspending and sending away from the army in the field officers guilty of grave misconduct[280].
It is clear that these variations on the original proposals had two main objects. The Spaniards evidently thought that if Wellington had every officer down to the lowest under his thumb, liable to be cashiered without any appeal, he might use this tremendous power to stock the whole army with men of one political colour, and make it into a machine quite independent of the Government, and capable of being turned against it. And similarly there was a great difference between the right to send an officer away from the front, and the right to drive him out of the army. To be put on half-pay, or on administrative duty in some office at Cadiz, was a much less terrible fate than cashiering.
It must be remembered that many Spaniards thought Wellington capable of aiming at a military dictatorship, to which he might be helped by generals who were considered Anglophils, such as Castaños, his nephew and chief-of-the-staff Giron, or Morillo. And others believed that British policy secretly desired the seizure of Cadiz and Minorca and the reduction of Spain to a Protectorate. Now if there had been any truth in these absurd suspicions, there is no doubt that the powers which Wellington demanded would have given him the chance of carrying out such designs. And there were an infinite number of Spanish officers, from generals like La Peña down to petty governors and members of provincial staffs, who had come into direct contact with Wellington, and knew his unflattering opinion of them. All these men in disgrace, or disgruntled placemen, thought that the new generalissimo would start his career by a general cashiering of those against whom he had an old grudge.
Hence pressure was brought to bear upon the Regents and the Cortes from many and diverse quarters, with the common plea that there must be no British military dictatorship, and that Spanish officers must be protected from possible persecution and oppression. The underlying idea was that if the mass of the middle and lower grades in the army were out of Wellington’s supervision, it did not matter so much who held the post of army-commander or captain-general. For the chiefs, though in influential posts, were few, and would not be able to carry their subordinates with them in any unpopular movement dictated to them by the generalissimo.
After much discussion, and with reluctance[281], Wellington accepted the modifications—thinking that the other things conceded gave him practically all that he needed. He was to find out his error in the year that followed. He had not guarded himself against seeing officers with whom he was satisfied removed from his field-army under the pretence of promotion, or of transference to other duties, or of political offences. He had forgotten to demand that he should have the power of retaining as much as that of dismissing generals. In this way he was deprived of the services of Castaños and afterwards of Giron, both of whom he was anxious to keep. Successors technically unobjectionable, whom he had no wish to ‘blackball,’ were substituted for them, to his deep regret. And another evasion of his intention was that officers whom he had intended to disgrace, and had removed from the front, were given posts elsewhere which could not be called ‘divisional’ or ‘separate’ commands, but were quite desirable; and so while the letter of the bargain was kept, the purpose of inflicting punishment on such people was foiled.
Another long controversy was provoked by Wellington’s proposal that the small armies should be amalgamated, and that unnecessary captain-generals with their staffs should be got rid of. Much but not all of what he asked was conceded. The Murcian and Valencian armies were consolidated, and given the new name of the ‘Second Army’—the Catalan army being still the ‘First Army’. But they were not amalgamated with the Andalusian command (now the ‘Third Army’), as Wellington suggested. And similarly the Estremaduran, Castilian, and Galician armies, with the outlying Cantabrian division, ceased to be the 5th, 6th, and 7th Armies, and took the new name of the Fourth. And a great reduction of staffs and removal of contending military authorities was procured, by nominating Elio, commander of the new 2nd Army, to be Captain-General of Murcia and Valencia, Del Parque of the 3rd Army to be Captain-General of Granada and Jaen, and Castaños to be Captain-General alike of Estremadura, Galicia, and Castile. This was all to the good, but the Cortes refused Wellington’s other proposal, that the civil government in each province should be placed under the control of the army-commanders. Declaring that it was constitutionally impossible to abolish the independence of the civil power, the Cortes yet conceded that the jefe político (or provincial prefect) and the Intendant should obey the Captain-General ‘in all matters relating to the Army[282],’ also that nine-tenths of the revenue in each province should be allocated to the military budget. This would have worked if all parties concerned had been both willing and competent; but it remained a melancholy fact throughout the next campaign that the army-commanders could seldom get either money or food from the civil authorities, and that most essential operations were delayed by the absolute impossibility of moving large bodies of men without adequate magazines or a fair supply of money. The only regular income of the army was that drawn from the British subsidy.
But the worst of Wellington’s troubles were yet some months ahead. The Regency with which he had made his bargain[283] was displaced in March 1813, and succeeded by another. The Cortes was jealous of the Executive, and had determined to make for itself a supreme authority which should have neither brains nor energy. The subject of quarrel chosen was the old Regency’s alleged slackness in carrying out a recent Act which had abolished that moribund abuse the Inquisition[284]. After an all-night sitting and a vote of censure, the Regents were dismissed, and replaced by a group appointed under an absurd principle borrowed from the old régime, which was applied because it suited the desires of the assembly for the moment. It was composed of the three senior members of the Council of State—senility and weakness being desired. These were the Cardinal Bourbon—Archbishop of Toledo—an aged scion of the royal house, and the Councillors Pedro Agar and Gabriel Cisgar, who had been Regents before, but had been got rid of for incompetence. Thus all real power went to the Chamber itself—the Regency having become a negligible quantity. Wellington’s position was decidedly impaired by the change—largely because a new minister-of-war had come into office, General Juan O’Donoju, of whom he had an evil memory as Cuesta’s chief-of-the-staff during the Talavera campaign. This clever, shifty, and contentious Irish-Spanish officer broached the theory that the agreement of December 1812 did not bind the new Regents, because they had never assented to it, and because it was contrary to the spirit of the Constitution that a foreigner should have the power to appoint or dismiss Spanish generals.
When Henry Wellesley at Cadiz, instructed by his brother, turned his heaviest diplomatic batteries[285] upon the Regents, and privately warned the leading members of the Cortes of the awkward results that would follow the repudiation of the agreement, O’Donoju was disavowed but not displaced. He continued to give perpetual trouble through the following summer by his persistent intrigues. Wellington was by no means satisfied with the attempts that were made to propitiate him, by the formal recognition of his status as generalissimo by the new Regents, and the gift of a great estate in Granada, the royal domain of Soto de Roma, which had been usurped by Godoy. He did not want grants but real authority. Of his future troubles we shall have to speak in their proper place.
The most enduring of them was provincial maladministration, which rendered so many of his orders futile. For usually when he directed a division to move, he was informed that it was destitute of both munitions and transport[286]. And changes of organization were often made against his protests—e. g. a new army regulation cut down all regimental formations to a single battalion of very heavy strength (1,200 bayonets). Wellington would have preferred a two-battalion formation, in which the second unit should act as a dépôt and feeder to the first[287]. He complained that if a regiment was badly cut up in action, there would be no machinery for keeping it up to a decent average. The experience of the British army with regard to single-battalion corps had been conclusive against the system for the last five years of Peninsular service. But his protests were vain—internal organization of units did not come within the wording of his powers as generalissimo, and the new organization continued, dozens of second battalions being scrapped.
The net result was that, when Wellington took the field in May 1813, he only had with him two of Castaños’s divisions and three of those of the Army of Galicia—less than 25,000 men. The Andalusian ‘Army of Reserve,’ which had been promised to him, started late for want of organization, moved slowly for want of magazines, and only reached the front when the battle of Vittoria had been won and the French had been expelled from Spain[288]. The Cortes had at least 160,000 men under arms; not a sixth part of them were available during the decisive operations. But of this more in its proper place.
Portugal, as usual, contributed its share to the troubles of the Commander-in-Chief, though they were but trifling compared to the Spanish problems. The Prince Regent at Rio de Janeiro was an expensive person, who actually at the worst of the war drew money out of Portugal from the Braganza private domains, though he had all the revenues of Brazil to play with[289]. Moreover, he had a tiresome habit of sending incompetent hangers-on to Europe, with a request that berths might be found for them. But he was not actively noxious—the same could not be said of his wife, the Spanish princess Carlotta, who was still harping on her natural claim to be Regent of Spain on behalf of her imprisoned brother Ferdinand, and still interfered from time to time at Cadiz, by ordering the small knot of deputies who depended on her to attack the existing regency, or to vote in incalculable ways on questions of domestic politics. Fortunately she was so great a clerical and reactionary that the ‘Liberal’ majority in the Cortes had secretly resolved that she should never get into power. When the old regency was evicted in March 1813, it was suspected that the Cardinal Bourbon was put at the head of the succeeding body mainly because the presence of a prince of the blood in the Executive seemed to make it unnecessary to import another member of the royal house. For this small mercy Henry Wellesley wrote a letter of thanksgiving to his brother at the front. It was fortunate that the Prince Regent himself gave no encouragement to his wife’s ambitions, being as indolent as she was active, and very jealous of her secret intrigues with foreigners. At one time during the winter of 1812-13 she showed an intention of departing for Europe, but with the assistance of the British ambassador João succeeded in frustrating her scheme for appearing at Cadiz in person to claim her supposed rights.
Meanwhile the civil government of Portugal continued to be directed by the existing Council of Regency, of whom the majority were honest if not always well-advised. It is true that Wellington’s old enemies[290] the Patriarch of Lisbon and the Principal Sousa still remained members of it: the determination to evict them which he had declared in 1810 was never carried out—the one was so powerful from his position in the Church, the other from the influence of the widespread Sousa family, that in the end he left them undisturbed. They were perhaps less dangerous in the Regency than out of it, with their hysterical appeals to narrow national sentiment, protests against the doings of their colleagues, and perpetual intrigues. A frondeur is partly muzzled when he holds office. And in practical administration they were steadily voted down by the majority of the Regency, consisting of the Marquis of Olhão, the Conde de Redondo[291], Dr. Nogueira, and last but not least the British Minister Sir Charles Stuart, whose presence on the board was perhaps necessary, but certainly very trying to Portuguese amour-propre. The three native regents were genuine patriots, and good friends of the alliance, but a little antiquated in their views as to administration and finance. The Secretary of State, Miguel Forjaz, to whom so many of Wellington’s letters are addressed, was a much more modern personage with a broader intelligence: indeed, Wellington considered him on the whole the most capable statesman in the Peninsula.
There were two standing sources of friction between the British army and the Portuguese Regency—both inevitable, and both tiresome from the point of view of the necessary entente between two allied nations. The more irritating but less important was trouble caused by the daily movement of troops, especially troops in small bodies, or individual officers. A perusal of the records of many scores of courts martial, as well as of the correspondence of Wellington and Beresford, leads to the conclusion that there were grave faults on both sides. Parties of British soldiers on the march, when unaccompanied by an officer, were given to the illegal ‘embargoing’ of carts or mules, to the extortion of food by force or threats, to mishandling of the peasantry when denied what they asked: occasionally they went so far as acts of murder or arson[292]. And it cannot be denied that individual officers of unsatisfactory type were occasionally guilty of gross misconduct—drunken orgies, wanton disregard of legal authority in requisitions, even acts of insult or assault on local magistrates[293]. On the other hand, the provocation was often considerable—there were plenty of cases established of the denial of legal billets, which kept parties waiting in the rain for hours, of wanton incivility, of attempts at extortion in prices, of actual highway robbery[294], and false accusations brought up to cover neglect of duty. One of Wellington’s main complaints was that he had to waste time in investigating imaginary outrages, which, on inquiry, turned out to have been invented to serve as countercharges against accusations of slackness or misfeasance. He was determined that outrages by the army should cease—indeed, he hanged, first and last, some fifty soldiers for plunder accompanied with violence, an offence which he would never pardon. But the Portuguese magistrates were prone to make accusations, and then to protest against having to support them by evidence. By a curious turn of official pride many of them refused to testify before courts martial, or even to send witnesses to appear before such bodies, standing to the theory that it was beneath the dignity of a magistrate to come with evidence before a foreign military tribunal[295]. The result of this was that offenders brought up for trial, and often probably guilty, had to be acquitted for lack of proof. On the other hand, accusations, made and supported, were sometimes found to be entirely groundless—in one supposed murder case, the alleged corpse was discovered in perfect health; in another, a magistrate who accused a British officer of assault was found to have been dining with him and frequenting his quarters, long after the supposed offence[296].
The Portuguese Regency was bound to stand up in defence of its magistrates—Wellington, though always ready to punish proved crimes, was determined not to take accusation as equivalent to conviction, merely because it was preferred by a constituted authority. Hence came perpetual friction and recrimination; that things were no worse was certainly due to the fact that the commander-in-chief’s iron discipline, and rigorous dealing with his own people, could not fail to impress the Portuguese with the fact that he was always trying to be just.
The other and more fundamentally dangerous source of wrangling in Portugal was finance. There could be no disputing the fact that the part of the army which was not directly maintained from the British subsidy was often six months in arrears of pay, and still more often on the edge of starvation. Portuguese paper money, in which many transactions had to take place, and which could be legally used for a certain percentage of all army payments, was not only at a habitual discount of at least 25 percent., but also fluctuating in exchange-value from day to day. Hence came all manner of illicit speculations by merchants, both British and Portuguese, who were always trying to buy Government paper at under its quotation for the day, and to put it off on others at an exaggerated estimate. The same took place with Commissariat Warrants, which unscrupulous brokers bought from the ignorant peasantry for a mere song, after setting rumours about concerning impending bankruptcy of the state, and then cashed at full face-value in Lisbon or London.
The Regency maintained that all the trouble came from the simple fact that the war had placed upon the back of Portugal, a small country, half of whose territory had been wasted by Soult and Masséna in 1809 and 1810, a much greater burden than could be borne. The armed forces alone—some 50,000 regular troops, and often as many militia in the garrisons—were so many hands taken away from agriculture, the only staple industry of the land. Money was going out of the realm year by year to purchase wheat, because the people could not produce enough to maintain their existence. Prices had risen to heights that terrified those who remembered pre-war days: the pay of the army was enormous compared to the rates before 1808, and much of it was going, under Marshal Beresford’s system, to the British officers who were now holding a clear majority of all the senior ranks and commands. All available money went to the army, and the civil administration was starved. The Regency acknowledged the deplorable state of its finances, but could only suggest remedies which had grave inconveniences. Another British loan was asked for; but considering the heavy subsidy that Portugal was receiving already, the British Government gave little encouragement to such an idea[297]. The Portuguese minister in London (the Conde de Funchal, one of the Sousas) suggested a large measure of confiscation of Church and Crown lands—which could then be sold. But this would involve a quarrel with the Church party in Portugal, who had been loyal supporters of the British alliance, and probably with the Prince Regent also, since he was drawing a private income from the Braganza estates. It might also produce a general shock to national credit, for it would deal a blow to the general stability of society, and terrify all landholders. Moreover, it appeared doubtful if purchasers of Church lands would present themselves: and Crown lands were largely uncultivated and worthless tracts in the Alemtejo[298]. The measure was carried out, indeed, many years later, during the civil wars of Miguel and Maria; but then it came as a consequence of a purely domestic struggle, in which the Church party had taken the beaten side. The circumstances of 1813 were entirely different. A third expedient suggested was the establishment of a National Bank, after the model of the Bank of England, which should take over the management of the public debt and currency. But credit and guarantees must be at the back of any such association, and unless the British Government were ready to become the guarantor (which was impossible) it was hard to see what new securities could be found.
Wellington’s panacea for financial distress was not heroic measures but careful and honest administration of details. He held that there was great slackness and partiality in the raising and collection of taxes, and that the amount received could be very largely increased by the abolition of abuses. In a very long memorandum, addressed to the Prince Regent João in April 1813, he launched out into an indictment of the whole financial system of the realm. ‘The great cities and even some of the smaller places of the kingdom have gained by the war: the mercantile class generally has enriched itself by the great disbursements which the army makes in cash: there are individuals in Lisbon and Oporto who have amassed immense sums. The fact is not denied that the “tributes” regularly established at Lisbon and Oporto, and the contribution of ten per cent. on the profits of the mercantile class are not really paid to the state.... I have recommended the adoption of methods by which the taxes might be really and actually collected, and merchants and capitalists really pay the tenth of their annual profits as an extraordinary contribution for the war.... It remains for the Government to explain to your Royal Highness the reasons why it will not put them in practice—or some other expedient which might render the revenue of the state equal to its expenses.’ He then proceeds to urge supervision of a Custom House notorious for letting off powerful importers overlightly, and of the collectors of land-revenue, who were allowed to keep state balances in their hands for months without paying them in to the Treasury[299].
In letters to Charles Stuart[300] as a member of the Regency Wellington let out in much more unguarded terms. The root of corruption was in the mercantile community, who had squared the minor bureaucracy. The army and state would have been ruined long ago, but for his own protests and insistence, by the jobbers of Lisbon, not only Portuguese, Jews, cosmopolitans of all sorts, but ‘sharks calling themselves British merchants.’ The Government is ‘teased into disapprobation of good measures by the merchants, who are interested in their being discontinued. But when it is necessary to carry on an expensive system of war with one-sixth of the money in specie necessary, we must consider questions and adopt measures of this description, and we ought to have the support and confidence of your Government in adopting them.’
Making allowance alike for the difficulties of the Regency, and the irritation of the much-worried general, it seems fair to say that on the one hand Wellington was right in denouncing jobbery and urging administrative reforms, but that on the other hand no such reforms, however sweeping, would have sufficed to make both ends balance in the revenue of the exhausted kingdom of Portugal. The task was too heavy—but the eighteenth-century slackness and corruption, which still survived in too many corners of the bureaucracy, made it even heavier than it need have been. It is probable that Wellington’s palliatives would have failed to make receipts meet expenditure, however hardly the screw might have been turned. But a levy of 10 per cent. on commercial profits does not look very heavy to the taxpayer of 1921!
This is a military not an economic or a financial history; it is unnecessary to go further into Portuguese problems. The main thing to be remembered is that they bulked large in the correspondence of the harassed chief, who sat writing minutes on all topics, civil no less than strategical, in his desolate head-quarters at Freneda.