LIII. a prop of support in family misfortune; they provided CHAP. periodical amusements and festivities for the peasants; 1808. 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 because a large proportion of its two millions of present destitute inhabitants will hereafter infallibly be found in the neighbour- Revolutions hood of the workhouses where parochial relief is dealt 374, 376. out.1 1 Walton's of Spain, ii. influence in It is observed with surprise by General Foy, that in 17. every age the king, the church, and the people, have Its great combined together in Spain: an alliance utterly inexpli- the Spanish cable on the principles of the French revolutionary school, contest. but susceptible of an easy solution when the benefits which 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. Everywhere the parish priests were the LIII. 1808. CHAP, chief promoters of the insurrection; it was their powerful voice which roused the people to resistance; and many of the most renowned leaders of the desultory bands who maintained 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 an intrepid 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 revolution Most of all, Spain was still a virgin soil. Her people were not exhausted with revolutionary passions; they hausted by had not learned by bitter experience the vanity of all attempts to regenerate mankind by any other means than the improvement of their moral and religious principles. Though the monarchy was grey 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 reigns had passed over the state LIII. 1808. without either weakening the force of popular passion, CHAP. 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, everywhere 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 everywhere 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 CHAP. LIII. 1808. 19. common danger, brought to unite cordially with each other. Such was the country which thereafter became the Composi- grand theatre of the contest between France and Engcharacter of land; and such the eminently favourable battle-field army at this which the unbounded ambition and perfidious treachery tion and the French period. of the French Emperor at length afforded to the British * The numbers were as follows, all paid by the French government :- Cavalry, 380,000 Swiss, Germans, Hanoverians, and Irish, in French pay, 32,000 46,000 Gendarmerie, coast-guards, veterans, 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 For, i. 52, 53. LIII. 1808. belief of their invincibility which was the surest means of CHAP. realising it; paralysed alike the statesman 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 many eyes had been turned in breathless anxiety, had abandoned the conflict as one apparently striving against 52, 63." the decrees of fate.1 1 Foy, i. pline, equip efficiency. Nor was the actual efficiency of this immense army 20. inferior to its imaginative terrors. Though the wars of Their disciGermany and Poland had made frightful chasms in the ment, and ranks of the veteran soldiers, yet the officers and noncommissioned officers, the bones and sinews of the army, possessed the immense advantage of tried merits and long experience. Such had been the consumption of human life during the late campaigns, that every conscript who survived a few years was sure of becoming an officer; and while this certainty of promotion to the few survivors kept alive the military spirit of the whole population, it insured for the direction of the army the inestimable basis of tried valour and experienced skill. Every military man knows, that if the officers and non-commissioned officers are experienced and brave, it is no difficult matter, even out of the most unpromising materials, to form in a short period of time an effective army. The examples of the Portuguese and Hindoos, under British, and the northern Italians, under French officers, were not required to establish a fact illustrated by the experience of every age from the days of the Romans. This advantage appeared not merely in the field of battle; desperate valour, fortunate accident, can sometimes there supply the wants of experience and organisa |