The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. William Wordsworth
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which awaits you.—Every city, town, or village, which shall take up arms against my forces, and whose inhabitants shall rise upon the French troops, shall be delivered up to pillage and totally destroyed, and the inhabitants shall be put to the sword—every individual taken in arms shall be instantly shot.' That these were not empty threats, we learn from the bulletins published by authority of the same Junot, which at once shew his cruelty, and that of the persons whom he employed, and the noble resistance of the Portugueze. 'We entered Beia,' says one of those dismal chronicles, 'in the midst of great carnage. The rebels left 1200 dead on the field of battle; all those taken with arms in their hands were put to the sword, and all the houses from which we had been fired upon were burned.' Again in another, 'The spirit of insanity, which had led astray the inhabitants of Beia and rendered necessary the terrible chastisement which they have received, has likewise been exercised in the north of Portugal.' Describing another engagement, it is said, 'the lines endeavoured to make a stand, but they were forced; the massacre was terrible—more than a thousand dead bodies remained on the field of battle, and General Loison, pursuing the remainder of these wretches, entered Guerda with fixed bayonets.' On approaching Alpedrinha, they found the rebels posted in a kind of redoubt—'it was forced, the town of Alpedrinha taken, and delivered to the flames:' the whole of this tragedy is thus summed up—'In the engagements fought in these different marches, we lost twenty men killed, and 30 or 40 wounded. The insurgents have left at least 13000 dead in the field, the melancholy consequence of a frenzy which nothing can justify, which forces us to multiply victims, whom we lament and regret, but whom a terrible necessity obliges us to sacrifice.' 'It is thus,' continues the writer, 'that deluded men, ungrateful children as well as culpable citizens, exchange all their claims to the benevolence and protection of Government for misfortune and wretchedness; ruin their families; carry into their habitations desolation, conflagrations, and death; change flourishing cities into heaps of ashes—into vast tombs; and bring on their whole country calamities which they deserve, and from which (feeble victims!) they cannot escape. In fine, it is thus that, covering themselves with opprobrium and ridicule at the same time that they complete their destruction, they have no other resource but the pity of those they have wished to assassinate—a pity which they never have implored in vain, when acknowledging their crime, they have solicited pardon from Frenchmen, who, incapable of departing from their noble character, are ever as generous as they are brave.'—By order of Monseigneur le duc d'Abrantés, Commander in chief.'—Compare this with the Address of Massaredo to the Biscayans, in which there is the like avowal that the Spaniards are to be treated as Rebels. He tells them, that he is commanded by his master, Joseph Bonaparte, to assure them—'that, in case they disapprove of the insurrection in the City of Bilboa, his majesty will consign to oblivion the mistake and error of the Insurgents, and that he will punish only the heads and beginners of the insurrection, with regard to whom the law must take its course.'
To be the victim of such bloody-mindedness is a doleful lot for a Nation; and the anguish must have been rendered still more poignant by the scoffs and insults, and by that heinous contempt of the most awful truths, with which the Perpetrator of those cruelties has proclaimed them.—Merciless ferocity is an evil familiar to our thoughts; but these combinations of malevolence historians have not yet been called upon to record; and writers of fiction, if they have ever ventured to create passions resembling them, have confined, out of reverence for the acknowledged constitution of human nature, those passions to reprobate Spirits. Such tyranny is, in the strictest sense, intolerable; not because it aims at the extinction of life, but of every thing which gives life its value—of virtue, of reason, of repose in God, or in truth. With what heart may we suppose that a genuine Spaniard would read the following impious address from the Deputation, as they were falsely called, of his apostate countrymen at Bayonne, seduced or compelled to assemble under the eye of the Tyrant, and speaking as he dictated? 'Dear Spaniards, Beloved Countrymen!—Your habitations, your cities, your power, and your property, are as dear to us as ourselves; and we wish to keep all of you in our eye, that we may be able to establish your security.—We, as well as yourselves, are bound in allegiance to the old dynasty—to her, to whom an end has been put by that God-like Providence which rules all thrones and sceptres. We have seen the greatest states fall under the guidance of this rule, and our land alone has hitherto escaped the same fate. An unavoidable destiny has now overtaken our country, and brought us under the protection of the invincible Emperor of France.—We know that you will regard our present situation with the utmost consideration; and we have accordingly, in this conviction, been uniformly conciliating the friendship to which we are tied by so many obligations. With what admiration must we see the benevolence and humanity of his imperial and royal Majesty outstep our wishes—qualities which are even more to be admired than his great power! He has desired nothing else, than that we should be indebted to him for our welfare. Whenever he gives us a sovereign to reign over us in the person of his magnanimous brother Joseph, he will consummate our prosperity.—As he has been pleased to change our old system of laws, it becomes us to obey, and to live in tranquillity: as he has also promised to re-organize our financial system, we may hope that then our naval and military power will become terrible to our enemies, &c.'—That the Castilians were horror-stricken by the above blasphemies, which are the habitual language of the French Senate and Ministers to their Emperor, is apparent from an address dated Valladolid—'He (Bonaparte) carries his audacity the length of holding out to us offers of happiness and peace, while he is laying waste our country, pulling down our churches, and slaughtering our brethren. His pride, cherished by a band of villains who are constantly anxious to offer incense on his shrine, and tolerated by numberless victims who pine in his chains, has caused him to conceive the fantastical idea of proclaiming himself Lord and Ruler of the whole world. There is no atrocity which he does not commit to attain that end. … Shall these outrages, these iniquities, remain unpunished while Spaniards—and Castilian Spaniards—yet exist?'
Many passages might be adduced to prove that carnage and devastation spread over their land have not afflicted this noble people so deeply as this more searching warfare against the conscience and the reason. They groan less over the blood which has been shed, than over the arrogant assumptions of beneficence made by him from whose order that blood has flowed. Still to be talking of bestowing and conferring, and to be happy in the sight of nothing but what he thinks he has bestowed or conferred, this, in a man to whom the weakness of his fellows has given great power, is a madness of pride more hideous than cruelty itself. We have heard of Attila and Tamerlane who called themselves the scourges of God, and rejoiced in personating the terrors of Providence; but such monsters do less outrage to the reason than he who arrogates to himself the gentle and gracious attributes of the Deity: for the one acts professedly from the temperance of reason, the other avowedly in the gusts of passion. Through the terrors of the Supreme Ruler of things, as set forth by works of destruction and ruin, we see but darkly; we may reverence the chastisement, may fear it with awe, but it is not natural to incline towards it in love: moreover, devastation passes away—a perishing power among things that perish: whereas to found, and to build, to create and to institute, to bless through blessing, this has to do with objects where we trust we can see clearly—it reminds us of what we love—it aims at permanence—and the sorrow is, (as in the present instance the people of Spain feel) that it may last; that, if the giddy and intoxicated Being who proclaims that he does these things with the eye and through the might of Providence be not overthrown, it will last; that it needs must last:—and therefore would they hate and abhor him and his pride, even if he were not cruel; if he were merely an image of mortal presumption thrust in between them and the piety which is natural to the heart of man; between them and that religious worship which, as authoritatively as his reason forbids idolatry, that same reason commands. Accordingly, labouring under these violations done to their moral nature, they describe themselves, in the anguish of their souls, treated as a people at once dastardly and insensible. In the same spirit they make it even matter of complaint, as comparatively a far greater evil, that they have not fallen by the brute violence of open war, but by deceit and perfidy, by a subtle undermining, or contemptuous overthrow of those principles of good faith, through prevalence of which, in some degree, or under some modification or other, families, communities, a people, or any frame of human society, even destroying armies themselves can exist.
But enough of their wrongs; let us now see what were their consolations, their resolves, and their hopes. First, they neither