Invasion of Portugal (1807)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Invasion of Portugal in 1807 began not with cannon fire but with a newspaper. On the 29th of November 1807, the Prince Regent of Portugal was still wavering between surrender and escape when Admiral Sidney Smith handed him a copy of the Paris Le Moniteur Universel dated the 13th of October. It declared, in plain print, that the House of Braganza had been deposed. That single page resolved what weeks of panic and negotiation had not. Within hours, a royal fleet was loading treasure, state papers, and courtiers for a voyage to Brazil.

  The story of how France and Spain came to occupy Portugal in eleven days raises questions that linger long after the occupation itself: How does an army numbering nearly 25,000 men arrive in a capital city with only 1,500 staggering survivors, no cannon, and soaked cartridges, and still face no resistance? What combination of political paralysis, military decay, and imperial ambition made Portugal such easy prey? And what happened to the Portuguese soldiers and the people left behind once their regent sailed away?

• 2. Napoleon's Calculations

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  Portugal had irritated Napoleon for reasons that were both strategic and commercial. Britain was Portugal's oldest ally in Europe, and the Royal Navy regularly used Lisbon's harbour in its operations against France. British trade with Portugal's colony in Brazil was growing, giving Britain new revenues and supply lines. Napoleon also coveted the Portuguese fleet itself, fourteen ships of the line, eleven frigates, and seven smaller vessels, which would have been a significant addition to French naval power.

  When the Treaties of Tilsit concluded the War of the Fourth Coalition, Napoleon had the freedom to press harder. On the 19th of July 1807, he ordered his ambassador in Portugal to inform the country that it must close its ports to British shipping by the 1st of September. On the 23rd of September, speaking in front of the Portuguese minister to France, Napoleon publicly threatened to depose the House of Braganza.

  The secret Treaty of Fontainebleau, signed shortly after Junot's corps crossed into Spain on the 12th of October, proposed to carve Portugal into three pieces. The north, centred on Porto, would become the Kingdom of Northern Lusitania under Charles Louis of Etruria. The south would become the Principality of the Algarves under Manuel de Godoy, Prince of the Peace, who was Spain's dominant political figure. The rump around Lisbon would remain under direct French administration. The treaty was drafted by Napoleon's marshal of the palace, Géraud Duroc, alongside an agent for Godoy. Most observers, then and since, suspected Napoleon never intended to honour these divisions. Introducing a large French force into Spain served a purpose beyond Portugal, as it would facilitate his subsequent seizure of Spain itself.

• 3. A Paralysed Court

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  Crown Prince John was regent for his mother, Queen Maria I, who was mentally ill and incapable of ruling. On the 12th of August 1807, French and Spanish ambassadors delivered their ultimata to the Prince Regent simultaneously. Their notes required John to declare war on Great Britain, hand his fleet over to France and Spain, seize all British goods in Portuguese ports, and place all British subjects under arrest.

  John agreed to suspend diplomatic relations with Britain and close his ports. He drew the line at seizing British merchants and their property. Napoleon found this inadequate. The French and Spanish ambassadors requested their passports and departed the country on the 30th of September.

  As Junot's army drew closer through October and November, reports of its march arrived in Lisbon. John's government still failed to mobilise the regular army or call out the militia. At one point John had declared war on the United Kingdom on the 20th of October and even seized the remaining British subjects in Lisbon on the 8th of November, trying to appease Napoleon. But these gestures satisfied no one and surrendered the country's British connection without gaining any French goodwill.

  An emissary from the Prince Regent met Junot at Abrantes, offering submission under degrading terms. Junot understood the Portuguese were prostrate, assembled four battalions of his best remaining men, and pressed on. John's final decision came only when he read that newspaper page naming his own deposition. He loaded his family, nobles, courtiers, state papers, and treasure onto the fleet. So chaotic was the departure that fourteen carts loaded with treasure were abandoned on the docks when the fleet weighed anchor on the 29th of November.

• 4. A Broken Army

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  William, Count of Schaumburg-Lippe, had modernised the Portuguese army in 1762, but the reforms did not outlast the corruption that followed. Officers collected pay and supplies for soldiers listed on muster rolls who were absent, fictitious, or long gone. The proceeds went into the officers' own pockets. The result was cavalry units without horses, regimental depots without supplies, and battalions chronically below strength.

  The brief War of the Oranges in 1801 exposed these failures plainly. In the aftermath, each of the twenty-four line infantry regiments gained a second battalion. The twelve regiments of line cavalry were each expanded to 470 troopers. A fourth artillery regiment was added, and ten fortress artillery companies were established. The army's nominal strength on paper came to 48,396 men, including 36,000 line infantrymen and 5,640 line cavalrymen.

  But after 1801, the same cycle of embezzlement resumed. By 1807, the real figure may have been as low as 20,000 men. The army's infantry was organised into 27 regiments, three of them colonial; the remaining 24 carried names like Lippe, Albuquerque, and Bragança. There was also a light infantry unit called the D'Alorna Legion, which fielded a cavalry contingent in hussar uniforms. These forces were never called upon to resist Junot.

• 5. The Gruelling March

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  On the 12th of November 1807, Junot's corps entered Salamanca in western Spain having covered roughly 300 miles in twenty-five days. Napoleon then changed the route. The usual corridor into Portugal ran about 200 miles through Almeida and Coimbra. Instead, Junot was ordered to turn west from Alcántara along the Tagus valley, a distance of only 120 miles, to save time before Britain could intervene.

  Napoleon's impatience left his army in ruins. The detour passed through sparsely inhabited country with wretched roads. Marching south from Ciudad Rodrigo to Alcántara via the Perales Pass took five days in cold rain, through hills and ravines. Half the army's horses died on that stretch. One quarter of the soldiers straggled away from the column. All but six artillery pieces were left behind. At Alcántara, Junot seized ammunition and provisions from the Spanish troops guarding the bridge across the Tagus.

  Crossing into Portugal made things worse. The road along the Tagus valley was little more than a track through rocky wilderness, with Castelo Branco as the only substantial settlement. The advance guard reached Abrantes on the 23rd of November, still 75 miles from Lisbon. The rear of the corps did not close up until the 26th of November. By then the column had only four Spanish horse artillery pieces and half the soldiers were either straggling or foraging by force.

  On the 30th of November 1807, 1,500 French troops staggered into Lisbon. Their cartridges were soaked. Their uniforms were in tatters. They had not a single cannon or cavalryman. There was no resistance. It took ten more days for the rest of Junot's infantry to arrive, and even longer for the artillery to catch up.

• 6. Occupation and Revolt

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  Solano's Spanish column entered Portugal on the 2nd of December 1807, and Taranco occupied Porto on the 13th of December. The only armed resistance came from the governor of Valença, who refused to open his gates to the northern column until he learned that Lisbon had fallen and the regent had gone.

  Junot raised the French flag on Lisbon's public buildings on the 13th of December, which triggered a riot. Mounted troops were sent into the streets to disperse the crowd by force. As one of his first administrative acts, Junot disbanded the Portuguese army by discharging all soldiers with less than one year or more than six years of service. The remaining men were assigned to nine new units and most were marched to northern Germany for garrison duty.

  Napoleon's instructions to Junot made a difficult situation worse. Junot was ordered to confiscate the property of the roughly 15,000 people who had fled to Brazil and to levy a 100 million franc fine on the entire nation. The refugees had taken nearly half of Portugal's coin with them, leaving the French barely able to fund the occupation army. The taxes bred bitter resentment. By January 1808, there were executions of people who resisted French demands.

  The occupation's internal logic began to collapse after the Spanish Dos de Mayo Uprising. By the 6th of June 1808, news of the Spanish rebellion reached Porto, where General Domingo Belestá commanded 6,000 Spanish troops, Taranco having died during the winter. Belestá seized General François Jean Baptiste Quesnel and his thirty-man escort, then marched his entire force away to join the anti-French armies in Spain. Between the 9th and the 12th of June 1808, northwest Portugal rose in revolt.

  Two Portuguese units drafted into French service were used in the assault on Zaragoza on the 2nd of August 1808: 265 men of the 5th Infantry and 288 Caçadores. The Portuguese Legion later fought at the Battle of Wagram in July 1809 under General Carcôme Lobo, fielding 1,471 infantry in three battalions and 133 cavalry in two squadrons. In 1812 the remaining Portuguese troops, reorganised into three regiments, were sent into Russia with the French invasion. Few survived.

• 7. British Intervention

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  The revolt in Portugal created the opening Britain had been waiting for. In early August 1808, Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Wellesley landed in Mondego Bay with 16,000 soldiers. The campaign that followed produced the Battle of Roliça and the Battle of Vimeiro, the first engagements of what would become the Peninsular War.

  The Portuguese revolt against the French occupation reached its first pitched battle at Évora on the 29th of July 1808, weeks before Wellesley's forces came ashore. That battle, fought between French troops and a Portuguese force stiffened by civilian resistance, marked the moment when the swift occupation of November 1807 transformed into a long and grinding war on the Iberian Peninsula.