Chapter VIII: Modern Spain (2)

At seven o’clock a curious silence fell suddenly on the battered city and the engirdling trenches. Not a light gleamed from the frowning parapets, not a murmur arose from the blackened trenches. Suddenly a shout broke out on the right of the English attack; it ran, a wave of stormy sound, along the line of the trenches. The men who were to attack the great breach leaped into the open. In a moment the space between the hostile lines was covered with the stormers, and the gloomy, half-seen face of the great fortress broke into a tempest of fire.

Nothing could be finer than the vehement courage of the assault, unless it were the cool and steady fortitude of the defense. Swift as was the upward rush of the stormers, the race of the 5th, 77th, and 94th regiments was almost swifter. Scorning to wait for the ladders, they leaped into the great ditch, outpaced even the forlorn hope, and pushed vehemently up the great breach, while their red ranks were torn by shell and shot. The fire, too, ran through the tangle of broken stones over which they climbed; the hand-grenades and powder-bags by which it was strewn exploded. The men were walking on fire! Yet the attack could not be denied. The Frenchmen--shooting, stabbing, yelling--were driven behind their intrenchments. There the fire of the houses commanding the breach came to their help, and they made a gallant stand. “None would go back on either side, and yet the British could not get forward, and men and officers falling in heaps choked up the passage, which from minute to minute was raked with grape from two guns flanking the top of the breach at the distance of a few yards. Thus striving, and trampling alike upon the dead and the wounded, these brave men maintained the combat.”

It was the attack on the smaller breach which really carried Ciudad Rodrigo; and George Napier, who led it, has left a graphic narrative of the exciting experiences of that dreadful night. The light division was to attack, and Craufurd, with whom Napier was a favorite, gave him command of the storming party. He was to ask for one hundred volunteers from each of the three British regiments--the 43d, 52d, and the rifle corps--in the division. Napier halted these regiments just as they had forded the bitterly cold river on their way to the trenches. “Soldiers,” he said, “I want one hundred men from each regiment to form the storming party which is to lead the light division to-night. Those who will go with me come forward!”

Instantly there was a rush forward of the whole division, and Napier had to take his three hundred men out of a tumult of nearly one thousand five hundred candidates. He formed them into three companies, under Captains Ferguson, Jones, and Mitchell. Gurwood, of the 52d, led the forlorn hope, consisting of twenty-five men and two sergeants. Wellington himself came to the trench and showed Napier and Colborne, through the gloom of the early night, the exact position of the breach. A staff-officer, looking on, said, “Your men are not loaded. Why don’t you make them load?” Napier replied, “If we don’t do the business with the bayonet we shall not do it at all. I shall not load.”--“Let him alone,” said Wellington; “let him go his own way.” Picton had adopted the same grim policy with the third division. As each regiment passed him, filing into the trenches, his injunction was, “No powder! We’ll do the thing with the _could_ iron.”

A party of Portuguese carrying bags filled with grass were to run with the storming party and throw the bags into the ditch, as the leap was too deep for the men. But the Portuguese hesitated, the tumult of the attack on the great breach suddenly broke on the night, and the forlorn hope went running up, leaped into the ditch, a depth of eleven feet, and clambered up the steep slope beyond, while Napier with his stormers came with a run behind them. In the dark for a moment the breach was lost, but found again, and up the steep quarry of broken stone the attack swept.

About two-thirds of the way up, Napier’s arm was smashed by a grape-shot, and he fell. His men, checked for a moment, lifted their muskets to the gap above them, whence the French were firing vehemently, and forgetting their pieces were unloaded, snapped them. “Push on with the bayonet, men!” shouted Napier, as he lay bleeding. The officers leaped to the front, the men with a stern shout followed; they were crushed to a front of not more than three or four. They had to climb without firing a shot in reply up to the muzzles of the French muskets.

But nothing could stop the men of the light division. A 24-pounder was placed across the narrow gap in the ramparts; the stormers leaped over it, and the 43d and 52d, coming up in sections abreast, followed. The 43d wheeled to the right toward the great breach, the 52d to the left, sweeping the ramparts as they went.

Meanwhile the other two attacks had broken into the town; but at the great breach the dreadful fight still raged, until the 43d, coming swiftly along the ramparts, and brushing all opposition aside, took the defense in the rear. The British there had, as a matter of fact, at that exact moment pierced the French defense. The two guns that scourged the breach had wrought deadly havoc among the stormers, and a sergeant and two privates of the 88th--Irishmen all, and whose names deserve to be preserved--Brazel, Kelly, and Swan--laid down their firelocks that they might climb more lightly, and, armed only with their bayonets, forced themselves through the embrasure among the French gunners. They were furiously attacked, and Swan’s arm was hewed off by a saber stroke; but they stopped the service of the gun, slew five or six of the French gunners, and held the post until the men of the 5th, climbing behind them, broke into the battery.

So Ciudad Rodrigo was won, and its governor surrendered his sword to the youthful lieutenant leading the forlorn hope of the light division, who, with smoke-blackened face, torn uniform, and staggering from a dreadful wound, still kept at the head of his men.

In the eleven days of the siege Wellington lost one thousand three hundred men and officers, out of whom six hundred and fifty men and sixty officers were struck down on the slopes of the breaches. Two notable soldiers died in the attack--Craufurd, the famous leader of the light division, as he brought his men up to the lesser breach; and Mackinnon, who commanded a brigade of the third division, at the great breach. Mackinnon was a gallant Highlander, a soldier of great promise, beloved by his men. His “children,” as he called them, followed him up the great breach till the bursting of a French mine destroyed all the leading files, including their general. Craufurd was buried in the lesser breach itself, and Mackinnon in the great breach--fitting graves for soldiers so gallant.

Alison says that with the rush of the English stormers up the breaches of Ciudad Rodrigo “began the fall of the French empire.” That siege, so fierce and brilliant, was, as a matter of fact, the first of that swift-following succession of strokes which drove the French in ruin out of Spain, and it coincided in point of time with the turn of the tide against Napoleon in Russia.

But, as already noted, the climax of the war occurred at Vittoria. Wellington, overtaking the French at that place, inflicted on them a defeat which drove in utter rout one hundred and twenty thousand veteran troops from Spain. There is no more brilliant chapter in military history; and, at its close, to quote Napier’s clarion-like sentences, “the English general, emerging from the chaos of the Peninsular struggle, stood on the summit of the Pyrenees a recognized conqueror. From those lofty pinnacles the clangor of his trumpets pealed clear and loud, and the splendor of his genius appeared as a flaming beacon to warring nations.”

The victory not only freed Spain from its invaders; it restored the spirit of the allies. The close of the armistice was followed by a union of Austria with the forces of Prussia and the Czar; and in October a final overthrow of Napoleon at Leipzig forced the French army to fall back in rout across the Rhine. The war now hurried to its close. Though held at bay for a while by the sieges of San Sebastian and Pampeluna, as well as by an obstinate defense of the Pyrenees, Wellington succeeded in the very month of the triumph at Leipzig in winning a victory on the Bidassoa which enabled him to enter France. He was soon followed by the allies. On the last day of 1813 their forces crossed the Rhine; and a third of France passed, without opposition, into their hands. For two months more Napoleon maintained a wonderful struggle with a handful of raw conscripts against their overwhelming numbers; while in the south, Soult, forced from his intrenched camp near Bayonne and defeated at Orthes, fell back before Wellington on Toulouse. Here their two armies met in April in a stubborn and indecisive engagement. But though neither leader knew it, the war was even then at an end. The struggle of Napoleon himself had ended at the close of March with the surrender of Paris; and the submission of the capital was at once followed by the abdication of the emperor and the return of Ferdinand.

After the convulsions it had endured, Spain required a period of firm but conciliatory government; but the ill-fate of the country gave the throne at this crisis to the worst of her Bourbon kings. Ferdinand VII. had never possessed the good qualities which popular credulity had assigned to him, and he had learned nothing in his four years’ captivity except an aptitude for lying and intrigue. He had no conception of the duties of a ruler; his public conduct was regulated by pride and superstition, and his private life was stained by the grossest sensual indulgence.

But Spain was not allowed to work out its own salvation. Europe was dominated at this time by the Holy Alliance, which disguised a resolution to repress popular liberties and to maintain despotism under a pretended zeal for piety, justice and brotherly love. At the Congress of Verona (October, 1822), France, Austria, Russia and Prussia agreed upon armed intervention in Spain, in spite of the protest of Canning on the part of England. Spain was to be called upon to alter her constitution and to grant greater liberty to the king, and if an unsatisfactory answer were received France was authorized to take active measures. The demand was unhesitatingly refused, and a French army, 100,000 strong, at once entered Spain under the Duke of Angouleme (April, 1823). No effective resistance was made, and Madrid was entered by the invaders (May 23). The Cortes, however, had carried off the king to Seville, whence they again retreated to Cadiz. The bombardment of that city terminated the revolution and Ferdinand was released (October 1). His first act was to revoke everything that had been done since 1819. The Inquisition was not restored, but the secular tribunals took a terrible revenge upon the leaders of the rebellion. The protest of the Duke of Angouleme against these cruelties was unheeded. Even the fear of revolt, the last check upon despotism, was removed by the presence of the French army, which remained in Spain till 1827. But Spain had to pay for the restoration of the royal absolutism, as Canning backed up his protest against the intervention of France by acknowledging the independence of the Spanish colonies.

Ferdinand VII. was enabled to finish his worthless and disastrous reign in comparative peace. In 1829 he married a fourth wife, Maria Christina of Naples, and at the same time he issued a “Pragmatic Sanction” abolishing the Salic law in Spain. No one expected any practical results from this edict, but a formal protest was made against it by the king’s brothers, Carlos and Francisco, and also by the French and Neapolitan Bourbons. In the next year, however, the queen gave birth to a daughter, Isabella, who was proclaimed as queen on her father’s death in 1833, while her mother undertook the office of regent.

Don Carlos at once asserted his intention of maintaining the Salic law, and rallied round him all the supporters of absolutism, especially the inhabitants of the Basque Provinces. Christina was compelled to rely upon the Liberals, and to conciliate them by the grant of a constitution, the estatuto real, which established two chambers chosen by indirect election. But this constitution, drawn up under the influence of Louis Philippe of France, failed to satisfy the advanced Liberals, and the Christinos split into two parties, the Moderados and Progresistas. In 1836 the latter party extorted from the regent the revival of the constitution of 1812. All this time the government was involved in a desperate struggle with the Carlists, who at first gained considerable successes under Zumalacarregui and Cabrera. But the death of Zumalacarregui in 1835 and the support of France and England ultimately gave the regent the upper hand, and in 1839 her general, Espartoro, forced the Basque Provinces to submit to Isabella. Don Carlos renounced his claims in favor of his eldest son, another Carlos, and retired to Trieste, where he died in 1855.

Christina now tried to sever herself from the Progresistas, and to govern with the help of the moderate party who enjoyed the patronage of Louis Philippe. But England, jealous of French influence at Madrid, threw the weight of her influence on to the side of the Radicals, who found a powerful leader in Espartero. In 1840, Christina had to retire to France, and Espartero was recognized as regent by the Cortes. But his elevation was resented by the other officers, while his subservience to England made him unpopular, and in 1848 he also had to go into exile. Isabella was now declared of age. Christina returned to Madrid, and the Moderados under Narvaez obtained complete control over the government. This was a great victory for France, and Louis Philippe abused his success by negotiating the infamous “Spanish marriages.” A husband was found for Isabella in her cousin, Francis of Assis, whose recommendation in French eyes was the improbability of his begetting children. On the same day the queen’s sister, Maria Louisa, was married to Louis Philippe’s son, the Duke of Montpensier. By this means it was hoped to secure the reversion of the Spanish throne for the House of Orleans. The scheme recoiled on the heads of those who framed it. The alienation of England gave a fatal impulse to the fall of Louis Philippe, while the subsequent birth of children to Isabella deprived the Montpensier marriage of all importance.

Spanish history during the reign of Isabella II. presents a dismal picture of faction and intrigue. The queen herself sought compensation for her unhappy marriage in sensual indulgence, and tried to cover the dissoluteness of her private life by a superstitious devotion to religion and by throwing her influence to the side of the clerical and reactionary party. Every now and then the Progresistas and Moderados forced themselves into office, but their mutual jealousy prevented them from acquiring any permanent hold upon the government. In 1866, Isabella was induced to take vigorous measures against the Liberal opposition. Narvaez was appointed chief minister; and the most prominent Liberals, Serrano, Prim and O’Donnell, had to seek safety in exile. The Cortes were dissolved, and many of the deputies were transported to the Canary Islands. The ascendency of the court party was maintained by a rigorous persecution, which was continued after Narvaez’s death (April, 1868) by Gonzales Bravo.

Common dangers succeeded at last in combining the various sections of the Liberals for mutual defense, and the people, disgusted by the scandals of the court and the contemptible camarilla which surrounded the queen, rallied to their side. In September, 1868, Serrano and Prim returned to Spain, where they raised the standard of revolt and offered the people the bribe of universal suffrage. The revolution was speedily accomplished and Isabella fled to France, but the successful rebels were at once confronted with the difficulty of finding a successor for her. During the interregnum Serrano undertook the regency and the Cortes drew up a now constitution by which a hereditary king was to rule in conjunction with a senate and a popular chamber.

As no one of the Bourbon candidates for the throne was acceptable, it became necessary to look around for some foreign prince. The offer of the crown to Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen excited the jealousy of France, and gave Napoleon III. the opportunity of picking a quarrel, which proved fatal to himself, with the rising state of Prussia. At last a king was found (1870) in Amadeus of Aosta, the second son of Victor Emmanuel, who made an honest effort to discharge the difficult office of a constitutional king in a country which was hardly fitted for constitutional government. But he found the task too hard and too distasteful, and resigned in 1878.

A provisional republic was now formed, of which Castelar was the guiding spirit. But the Spaniards, trained to regard monarchy with superstitious reverence, had no sympathy with republican institutions. Don Carlos seized the opportunity to revive the claim of inalienable male succession, and raised the standard of revolt in the Basque Provinces, where his name was still a power. The disorders of the democrats and the approach of civil war threw the responsibility of government upon the army. The Cortes were dissolved by a military _coup d’etat_; Castelar threw up his office in disgust; and the administration was undertaken by a committee of officers. Anarchy was suppressed with a strong hand, but it was obvious that order could only be restored by reviving the monarchy. Foreign princes were no longer thought of, and the crown was offered to and accepted by Alfonso XII., the young son of the exiled Isabella (1874).

His first task was to terminate the Carlist war, which still continued in the north, and this was successfully accomplished in 1876. Time was required to restore the prosperity of Spain under a peaceful and orderly government and to consolidate by prescription the authority of the restored dynasty. Unfortunately a premature death carried off Alfonso XII. in 1885, before he could complete the work which circumstances laid upon him. The regency was intrusted to his widow, Christina of Austria, and the birth of a posthumous son (May 17, 1886), who is now the titular king of Spain, has excited a feeling of pitying loyalty which may help to secure the Bourbon dynasty in the last kingdom which is left to it.