CHAP. 1808. 15. The church: and character. 1 Laborde, iv. 194. But the peasantry, hardy and undaunted as they were, would have been unable to have combined in any effective league for their common defence, destitute as they for the most part were of any support from their natural leaders, its influence the owners of the soil, if it had not been for the weight and influence of a body which, in every age, has borne a leading part in the contests of the Peninsula. This was THE CHURCH, the lasting and inveterate enemy in every country of revolutionary innovation. The ecclesiastics in Spain were very numerous, amounting, according to the census taken in 1787, to twenty-two thousand four hundred and eighty parish priests, and forty-seven thousand seven hundred and ten regular clergy belonging to monasteries or other public religious establishments.1 The influence of this great body was immense. Independent of their spiritual ascendency in a country more strongly attached than any in Europe to the Romish church, they possessed, as temporal proprietors, an unbounded sway over their flocks. As in all other countries, it had long been felt that the church was the best and most indulgent landlord; the ecclesiastical estates, which were very numerous and extensive, were much better cultivated in general than any in the hands of lay proprietors; and the tenantry held their possessions under them for such moderate rents, and by so secure a tenure, that they had long enjoyed almost the advantages and consideration of actual landholders.2 2 Malte Brun, vii. 667, 672 16. usefulness to the people. Nor was this all; the charity and beneficence of the monks had set on foot, in every part of the country, Its immense extensive institutions, through which, more than any others by which they could be effected, the distresses of the poor had been relieved. They partook in a great degree of the character of the hospice, particularly in the northern provinces. To the peasant they often served as banking establishments, where none other existed in the province, and as such essentially contributed to agricultural improvement. The friars acted as schoolmasters, LIII. 1808. advocates, physicians, and apothecaries. Besides feeding CHAP. and clothing the poor, and visiting the sick, they afforded spiritual consolation. They were considerate landlords and indulgent masters; peace-makers in domestic broils, a prop of support in family misfortune; they provided periodical amusements and festivities for the peasants; advanced them funds if assailed with misfortune; furnished them with seed if their harvest had failed. Most of the convents had fundaciones, or endowments, for professors who taught rhetoric and philosophy, besides keeping schools open for the use of the poor; they also supplied parochial ministers when wanted, and their preachers were considered the best in Spain. Superficial or free-thinking travellers, observing that the aged, the sick, and the destitute, were always to be found in numbers round the convent gates, supposed that they created the suffering which they were so instrumental in relieving, and in consequence that the church was chargeable with the augmentation of pauperism; forgetting that the poor ever will be assembled together round those establishments where their sufferings are relieved; and that to represent such beneficent institutions as the cause of this distress, is just as absurd as it would be to decry fever hospitals because their wards are generally filled with typhus patients, or poor laws in Ireland 1 Walton's because a large proportion of its two millions of present Revolutions destitute inhabitants will hereafter infallibly be found in 374, 376. the neighbourhood of the workhouses where parochial relief is dealt out.1 of Spain, ii. 17. It is observed with surprise by General Foy, that in every age the king, the church, and the people, have combined together in Spain: an alliance utterly inexplicable Its great on the principles of the French revolutionary school, but influence in the Spanish susceptible of an easy solution when the benefits which contest. the ecclesiastical bodies conferred both on the crown, in standing between it and the encroachments of the nobility, and the peasantry, in averting from them the evils of poverty, are taken into consideration. The whole course of events during the Peninsular war, demonstrated that this influence was established on the most durable foundation. Every where the parish priests were the chief promoters of the insurrection; it was their powerful voice LIII. CHAP. which roused the people to resistance; and many of the most renowned leaders of the desultory bands who main1808. tained the contest when the regular forces were destroyed, came from the ecclesiastical ranks. The clergy, both regular and parochial, early perceived the total destruction of their interests which would ensue from the triumph of the French invasion; they recollected the decrees of the Convention against the clergy, and the horrors of the war in La Vendée. And though Napoleon had to a certain extent restored the altar, yet they were well aware that even his powerful hand had been able to do this only in a very ineffectual manner. They knew that religion was tolerated in France, not re-established; and that the indigent curés, who to the north of the Pyrenees drew a wretched pittance yearly from the public treasury, were very different, both in consideration and influence, from the dignified clergy in possession of their own estates, who formerly constituted so important a part of the French monarchy. It was this body, possessed of such influence, and animated with such feelings, who in Spain proved the real leaders of the people; who, in the absence of the government, the nobility, and the army, boldly threw themselves into the breach; and, organising out of the strength and affections of the peasantry the means of prolonged resistance, rendered the Peninsula the charnel-house of the French armies, and the grave of revolutionary power. 18. Spain was still unex passions. Most of all, Spain was still a virgin soil. Her people were not exhausted with revolutionary passions; they had not learned by bitter experience the vanity of all hausted by attempts to regenerate mankind by any other means than revolutionary the improvement of their moral and religious principles. Though the monarchy was gray in years, the nobility corrupt or selfish, the government feeble and incapable, the nation as a whole was still untainted; the debility of the Bourbon reign had passed over the state without either weakening the force of popular passion, or destroying the fountains of public virtue. The peasants in the mountains, the shepherds in the plains, still inherited, in unmixed purity, the blood of the Cid and Pelajo; still were animated by the spirit which sustained the conflict of seven centuries with the Moorish invader. They were free from that last and worst cause of national corruption, which springs from the people having been themselves admitted to a share of power, participating in its passions, feeling its sweets, profiting by its corruptions. They were exempt from that despair which results from the experienced impossibility, by changing the class which governs, of eradicating either the vices of the governors, or the sufferings of the governed. Hence an intermixture in the Peninsular revolutionary war of passions the most opposite, and usually ranged in fierce hostility against each other; and hence the long duration and unexampled obstinacy with which it was conducted. While the rural population, at the voice of their pastors, every where took up arms, and rushed with inconsiderate zeal into the conflict, to combat under the banners of the Cross for their salvation, the indolent urban multitudes were roused not less by temporal ambition to league their forces under the national colours. The dissolution of government, the resolution of society into its pristine elements, had generally thrown political power and the immediate direction of affairs into their hands; revolutionary passion, democratic ambition, were called into activity by the very necessity which had every where thrown the people upon their own resources. The provincial juntas, chosen in the chief towns, soon became so many centres of revolutionary action and popular intrigue. And thus the two most powerful passions which can agitate the human heart, religious enthusiasm and democratic ambition, usually seen in opposite ranks, and destined to fierce collision in that very realm in future times, were for a season, by the pressure of common danger, brought to unite cordially with each other. CHAP. 1808. 19. and character period. Such was the country which thereafter became the grand theatre of the contest between France and England; and such the eminently favourable battle-field which the Composition unbounded ambition of the French Emperor at length of the French afforded to the British arms. They now descended to the army at this conflict on the popular side; they went forth to combat, not merely for the real interests, but the present desires of the people. The forces, indeed, which the contending parties could bring into this great arena were, to appearance at least, very unequal; and even the most sanguine CHAP. LIII. 1808. could not contemplate without alarm the enormous preponderance which weighed down the scale on the side of the Emperor Napoleon. He had six hundred thousand French soldiers, including seventy thousand horse, and at least a hundred and fifty thousand auxiliaries from the allied states at his disposal; but the magnitude of this force, great as it was, constituted the least formidable part of its character. It was the quality, experience, and spirit of his soldiers which formed the principal source of their strength. They stood forth to the conflict, strong in the experience of fifteen years of warfare, terrible from the recollection of a hundred triumphs. The halo of glory which surrounded, the prestige of victory which preceded them, was more difficult to withstand than either the charges of their cuirassiers or the ravages of their artillery. It fascinated and subdued the minds of men; spread universally that belief of their invincibility which was the surest means of realising it; paralysed alike the statesmen who arrayed nations and the general who marshalled armies for the combat ; and roused even in the bravest hearts the dispiriting conviction that the contest was hopeless, and that to sink honourably was all that remained to gallant soldiers. This feeling especially prevailed at this juncture, after the hopes of Europe, strongly elevated by the strife of Eylau, had been dashed to the earth by the wreck of Friedland, and the reserve of Christendom, on whom so 1 Foy, i. 52, many eyes had been turned in breathless anxiety, had abandoned the conflict as one apparently striving against the decrees of fate.1 53. Nor was the actual efficiency of this immense army inferior to its imaginative terrors. Though the wars of Germany and Poland had made frightful chasms in the ranks of the veteran soldiers, yet the officers and noncommissioned officers, the bones and sinews of the army, * The numbers were as follows, all paid by the French government :Infantry of the line, Cavalry, Swiss, Germans, Hanoverians, and Irish, in French pay, Artillery and engineers, Gendarmerie, coast-guards, veterans, 380,000 70,000 32,000 46,000 92,000 620,000 Besides the forces of the Confederation of the Rhine, Italy, Naples, Holland, and the Grand-duchy of Warsaw-at least 150,000 more.-See Fox, i. 52, 53. |