Chapter XXXII (4)

Mr. Perceval replied, that, in the expression of the Prince’s anxiety for the speedy restoration of his father’s health, he and his colleagues could see nothing but additional motives for their most anxious exertions to give satisfaction to his Royal Highness, in the only manner in which it could be given, by endeavouring to promote his views for the security and happiness of the country. “Mr. Perceval,” he continued, “has never failed to regret the impression of your Royal Highness with regard to the provisions of the regency bill, which his Majesty’s servants felt it to be their duty to recommend to parliament. But he ventures to submit to your Royal Highness, that, whatever difficulties the present awful crisis of the country and the world may create in the administration of the executive government, your Royal Highness will not find them in any degree increased by the temporary suspension of the exercise of those branches of the royal prerogative which has been introduced by parliament, in conformity to what was intended on a former similar occasion; and that whatever ministers your Royal Highness might think proper to employ, would find in that full support and countenance, which, as long as they were honoured with your Royal Highness’s commands, they would feel confident they would continue to enjoy, ample and sufficient means for enabling your Royal Highness effectually to maintain the great and important interests of the united kingdom. And Mr. Perceval humbly trusts, that, whatever doubts your Royal Highness may entertain with respect to the constitutional propriety of the measures which have been adopted, your Royal Highness will feel assured, that they could not have been recommended by his Majesty’s servants, nor sanctioned by parliament, but upon the sincere, though possibly erroneous, conviction, that they in no degree trenched upon the true principles and spirit of the constitution.”

The opposition had made so sure of coming into power, that they let the list of their intended arrangement get abroad; “an arrangement,” they told us, “of one united, compact body of men, all holding the same principles, and all animated by the same views; and an administration,” they added, “of more internal strength, by the ties of mutual friendship, ... of more public influence, by talents, integrity, and stake in the country, never had been submitted to any Prince.” A meeting of the common council was called by their city partizans, to prepare an address of congratulation to the Regent upon the change of men and measures which he was about to make. Their disappointment was in proportion to their hopes; they affirmed, however, that the Prince’s determination would be received with real satisfaction by the friends of Lords Grey and Grenville, who must all feel that nothing but a sense of imperious duty could have induced them to undertake the irksome and arduous task of office in such times. “Three months,” they said, “had already elapsed under a total suspension of the functions of government, ... three months the most important, perhaps, that had ever occurred in our history; another month must have been added to the delay, if the Prince had yielded to his patriotic sentiments, and recurred all at once to the principles upon which he thought the administration would be most beneficially conducted. Thus much time must have been required for the re-election of those who would have vacated their seats, and for the re-establishment of the routine of office; but this delay might certainly, in a moment of such emergency, be productive of the most serious evil.” But while the Whigs thus affected the language of resignation, the radical journalists declared, “that a ministry formed by the two joint opposition lords would have excluded almost all the Prince’s friends; that from those lords the people could have expected nothing; but that they would have hoped for something from an arrangement that should have placed Lord Holland at the head of affairs, to the great mortification of those less popular and less liberal leaders. It was as well to retain Perceval and Liverpool, as to supersede them by Grey and Grenville.” Whigs and anarchists, however, both agreed in asserting, that the Prince had no confidence whatever in his ministers. “He signs papers,” said one of these journalists, “receives addresses, expresses his opinions respecting courts marshal and criminal, and has ten or a dozen people to walk before him; but with regard to the nation, he can only wish its prosperity, and has no more to do with its government than a keeper of geese.”

But the great and quiet majority of the nation regarded the Prince Regent’s determination with grateful joy: they anticipated, from the wisdom and feeling which dictated it, a perseverance in the true course of policy and honour, and in that anticipation looked on to a triumphant issue of the war, with a hope which from thenceforward suffered no abatement.

END OF VOL IV.

G. Woodfall, Printer, Angel Court, Skinner Street, London.

FOOTNOTES

[1] _Non est memoriæ ... quod in castro vel civitate aliquâ tales fuerint defensores._ Gesta Comitum Barcinonensium, Marca Hispanica, 568.

[2] This would naturally be deemed miraculous, and the miracle was ascribed to St. Narcissus and other saints, whose graves the French had disturbed, and scattered their remains about. One statement is, that the flies proceeded from St. Narcissus’s tomb. _Muscæ istæ partim erant lividæ, partim virides, in quâdam sui parte colorem rubeum denotantes._ (Gesta Com. Barcin. 569, ut supra.) _Ceterum, qui locorum periti sunt quæ circum Gerundam visuntur_, says the Archbishop Pierre de Marca, _ii testantur haud procul eâ urbe videri rupes ex quibus vulgò oriuntur etiamnum muscæ quales e scpulchro Sancti Narcissi prodiisse fabulantur. Quod si ita est, non ultra inquirendum est in earum originem quæ Gallico tum exercitui insultârunt, quas manifestum est ortas esse ex rupibus illis._ Marca Hispanica, 468.

The flies are described differently in the _Acta Sanctorum_ (Mart. t. ii. 624), where the miracles of St. Narcissus are given _ex hispanico Ant. Vincentii Domenecci. Ex ipso sancti præsulis sepulchro exierunt innumera examina muscarum, cœruleo partim, partim viridi colore tinctarum, rubrisque striis dispunctarum; quæ virorum equorumque subingressæ nares, non priùs deserebant occupatos, quàm spiritum vitamque abstulissent, concidentibus humi mortuis. Tanti enim erat veneni efficacia, ut seu virum seu equum momordissent, morsum continuò mors sequeretur._ These authorities are given because they relate to a curious fact in natural history, ... if there be any truth in the story; and that there was a plague of insects can hardly be doubted. That their bite was so deadly, and that they proceeded from the tomb, I should have hesitated as little as the reader to disbelieve, if some other accounts had not seemed to show that both these apparent improbabilities may be possible. It is said that one part of Louisiana is infested by a fly whose bite is fatal to horses. And about twenty years ago, at Lewes, when a leaden coffin, which had been interred about threescore years, was opened, the legs and thighbones of the skeleton were found to be “covered with myriads of flies, of a species, perhaps, totally unknown to the naturalist. The wings were white, and the spectators gave it the name of the coffin-fly. The lead was perfectly sound, and presented not the least chink or crevice for the admission of air”: and the flies which were thus released are described as being active and strong on the wing.

If, however, some long lost species had reappeared from the tomb, and multiplied so as to become a plague, it would have continued in the country. But if Pierre de Marca was rightly informed that a fly which corresponds in appearance to the description is still found there, it certainly possesses none of the tremendous powers which the legend ascribes to it.

[3] Marshal St. Cyr has the following remark upon this carnage, after observing that it proved useful as an example to other towns: _La gloire de defendre ses foyers domestiques, menacés par l’étranger, est grande, la plus grande de toutes, peut-être: mais la vertu qui y fait prétendre, ne serait point la première des vertus, si elle pouvait être pratiquée sans peril._ It must cost the heart something to reason thus even in a just war. Marshal St. Cyr tells us, indeed, that _le soldat devient naturellement cruel à la longue_: ... the more careful, therefore, should he be not to sear his feelings and his conscience by such reflections as this.

[4] An instance of heroism worthy of record was displayed by Luciano Aucio, a drummer belonging to the artillery, who was stationed to give the alarm whenever a shell was thrown: a ball struck off his leg at the knee; but when the women came to remove him, he cried out, “No, no; my arms are left, and I can still beat the drum to give my comrades warning in time for them to save themselves!” This brave lad was the only person during the siege who recovered after an amputation of the thigh.

[5] Two singular cases of contusion of the brain were observed at this time in the hospitals: one man did nothing but count with a loud and deliberate voice from forty to seventy, always beginning at one number and ending at the other, and this incessantly through the whole night. Another continually uttered the most extraordinary blasphemies and curses, exhausting the whole vocabulary of malediction, without any apparent emotion of anger: this case did not prove fatal, but the man was left in a state of helpless idiocy.

[6] A man deposed that he had seen the body when it was buried hastily, by night; the face, he said, was swollen, and the eyes forced out of their sockets. Supposing this testimony were true, the appearance would denote strangulation rather than poison; but that Alvarez should have been privately murdered is altogether improbable.

[7] Burnet says of the wars in the reign of William III. “The late king told me that in these campaigns the Spaniards were both so ignorant and so backward, so proud and yet so weak, that they would never own their feebleness or their wants to him. They pretended they had stores when they had none; and thousands when they scarce had hundreds. He had in their councils often desired that they would give him only a true state of their garrisons and magazines; but they always gave it false; so that for some campaigns all was lost, merely because they deceived him in the strength they pretended they had. At last he believed nothing they said, but sent his own officers to examine every thing.” Vol. ii. p. 7.

[8] Memoria de Azanza y O’Farrell, § 193, pp. 169, 170. They plead this in justification or excuse for themselves.

[9] The account of Kolli’s examination had in one part been palpably falsified. He was represented as saying that it was the Duke of Kent’s wish to send Ferdinand to Gibraltar; but that he would not have assisted in this plan, because it would have been in fact sending him to prison! The whole of these documents are printed in Louis Goldsmith’s Recueil de Decrets, Ordonnances, &c. t. iv. pp. 302–14; and by Llorente, in his Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire de la Revolution d’Espagne, t. ii. pp. 306–342. This unworthy Spaniard expresses there a decided opinion that Kolli himself was the person who went to Valençay, as the official report stated. The Baron, however, has published his own story, and it is confirmed by the declarations of Richard and Fouché, authentically made after the restoration of the Bourbons.

One curious fact appears in the Baron de Kolli’s Memoirs. Diamonds to the amount of 200,000 francs were taken from him by the police when he was seized. After the restoration he reclaimed them. The result of his application was a royal ordonnance, in which the King decided, that the other effects belonging to the claimant should be restored to him, but that the diamonds seized at Paris are, and remain, confiscated, as having been given to the Sieur de Kolli by a government then at war with France. And his renewed applications were answered by a repetition of this ordonnance!

[10] Notwithstanding the facility with which, in many instances, Louis was deluded by his brother, and the curious simplicity of character which he exhibits, it is impossible to peruse his _Documens Historiques et Reflexions sur le Gouvernement de la Hollande_, without feeling great respect for him. His conduct was irreproachable, his views benevolent even when erroneous, his intentions uniformly good; and excellent indeed must that disposition have been, which in such trying circumstances always preserved its natural rectitude.

It appears by these documents that the throne of Spain was offered to him before Joseph was thought of, and that he rejected the proposal as at once impolitic and iniquitous. But it is curious to see how completely he had been deceived concerning the course of events in the Peninsula, and still more extraordinary that in the year 1820 (when his book was published) he appears to have obtained no better information upon that subject than was communicated in the Moniteur during his brother’s reign.

[11] The prejudice against mercury prevailed so strongly among the native practitioners, that the commander-in-chief, at a time when syphilitic diseases were thinning the ranks, found it necessary to enforce its use in the army and in all the military hospitals.

[12] Some days after the storm the boats of the Triumph picked up about thirty tons of quicksilver, in leathern bags of fifty pounds each, which were cast on shore from the wreck. They were stowed below in the storerooms and after-hold, and the bags having been thoroughly soaked in the sea, decayed and burst before the danger was perceived. As much of the quicksilver as possible was collected, but it insinuated itself every where, and not less than ten tons weight was supposed to have got between the timbers, which could only be cleared by docking the ship and removing a plank at the lowest part near the keel. The provisions were spoilt; two or three hundred of the crew were so severely affected, that it was necessary to remove them immediately, many of them being in a state which left little chance of recovery; and the ship was sent to Gibraltar to have all her stores taken out, and undergo a thorough clearance.

[13] A minute and interesting account of this escape was published at Lausanne, 1817, with this title, _Relation du Séjour des Prisonniers de Guerre Français et Suisses sur le Ponton la Castille, dans la Baie de Cadix, et de leur Evasion le 15 May, 1810. Par L. Chapuis, de Lausanne, Chirurgien major_.

[14] Upon this windmill the governor intended to mount a gun, and the gun was lying in it, but not as yet mounted, and consequently useless; another dismounted gun was lying near the mill. These guns of course could be of no use in the action which ensued, but they figured in Marshal Massena’s account of it.

[15] Massena’s official statement of this action was a masterpiece of impudent falsehood. He asserted that General Craufurd’s force consisted of 2000 horse and 8000 foot, and that they were all posted under the guns of the fortress; that they gave way before the French, our cavalry not daring to meet them with the sabre, and the infantry pursued at a running step; that we lost sixty officers, of whom twenty-four were buried in the field of battle; 400 killed, 700 wounded, 400 prisoners, one stand of colours, and two pieces of cannon, while the loss of the conquerors did not amount to 300. He took no colours, and the two pieces of cannon were the dismounted guns at the windmill. In a subsequent dispatch Massena assured the war-minister that all his troops were burning with impatience to teach the English army what they had already taught Craufurd’s division. Our own gazette had already shown the veracity of this boaster’s account; but this new insult called forth a counter-statement from General Craufurd, from which this detail has chiefly been drawn, and to the truth of which the whole British army were witnesses.

[16] The author of _Der Feldzug von Portugal in den Jahren 1811 und 1812_ (_Stutgard und Tubingen_, 1816) is mistaken in calling it the burial-place of the kings of Portugal.

[17] Some of the Portugueze charging a superior force got so wedged in among the French, that they had not room to use their bayonets; they turned up the butt ends of their muskets, and plied them with such vigour, that they presently cleared the way.

[18] Ten ensigns’ commissions were sent out after this action by the commander-in-chief to Lord Wellington, as rewards for the same number of non-commissioned officers who had distinguished themselves.

[19] The Portugueze officer who was with Massena, and whose journal is printed in the _Investigador Portuguez_, states the number of killed and wounded whom the French left on the ground at 4600.

[20] There are in fact three passes over this Serra, all of them practicable for cavalry.

[21] Cardoso says, that to the east the Serra de Castello Rodrigo may be distinguished, which is thirty leagues off, the Serra de Minde to the south, and that of Grijo to the north, fifteen leagues distant. Westward is the mouth of the Mondego and the coast.

[22] A loss which was magnified to 500 in Massena’s dispatches.

[23] The under-gardener of the Botanical Garden at Coimbra, with his family, consisting of his wife (a young woman of eighteen, with an infant at the breast) and her mother, having tarried too long to accompany the army, was overtaken in the little town of Soure by some stragglers from the enemy’s advanced guard, who were in search of plunder. These miscreants secured the husband by fastening his hands behind him: they tied the mother in the same manner; the villain then, to whom the wife was allotted, either by agreement among them, or by virtue of his authority, endeavoured to tear the infant from her arms, that he might proceed to violate her in presence of her mother and her husband. Failing in this, and enraged at a resistance which he had not expected, he drew back a few yards, presented his musket, and swore he would fire at her if she did not yield. “Fire, devil!” was her immediate reply, and at the word she and her infant fell by the same shot. The ruffians stripped her body, and compelled the husband to carry the clothes on his back to Thomar, whither they carried him prisoner. During his detention there he pointed out the murderer to a Portugueze nobleman then serving with Massena; but whatever this traitor may have felt at the crime, he did not venture to report it to the French commander, and demand justice upon the criminal: the hopes of co-operation on the part of the Portugueze people which he had held out had been proved so utterly false, that Massena treated him with contemptuous dislike, and moreover every thing was permitted to their soldiers by the French generals in that atrocious campaign. The gardener effected his escape to Coimbra, where a subscription was raised for him, but he soon died, broken-hearted. The man himself related this tragedy to the British officer, from whom I received it. It is recorded here as an example of the spirit which the invaders frequently found in those Portugueze women who were unfortunate enough to fall into their hands.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book. Simple typographical errors were corrected and some unbalanced quotation marks were remedied. Other errors of these types were not changed because the corrections were not obvious to the Transcriber.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained; occurrences of inconsistent hyphenation have been changed only when there was a predominant preference throughout the book.

The source book used many Sidenotes, printed in italics. Most match entries in the Table of Contents, but some are either dates or citations. To preserve proximity with the original text, if they were printed mid-paragraph, that is where they appear here. Depending on the format in which you are reading this eBook, Sidenotes may be distinguished from regular text by being shown in some combination of italics, boldface, UPPER-CASE, enclosed in ♦DIAMOND SYMBOLS♦, being offset into the left-margin, or in a rectangular area within the regular text. Due to limitations of some eReaders, some sidenotes may appear next to or below each other, depending on the width of the screen.

The original Table of Contents used “ib.” when the page number was the same as the one in the previous entry. This eBook uses the actual page numbers.

Page 201: “not to be outdone” was missing the “to”; restored by Transcriber.

All six volumes of this work are available at no cost at Project Gutenberg. Some of these volumes reference each other, but some of the references do not seem to match the text.

Volume I: Project Gutenberg eBook number 60386
Volume II: Project Gutenberg eBook number 60387
Volume III: Project Gutenberg eBook number 60388
Volume IV: Project Gutenberg eBook number 60389
Volume V: Project Gutenberg eBook number 60390
Volume VI: Project Gutenberg eBook number 60391